


Nor Years Unborn

by thepointoftheneedle



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: AU, Alternate Timelines, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, FP's alcoholism, I like to set up hopeless situations and then wrangle them into happy endings, It's another one where you have to have some faith in me not to break your heart, Kind of a ghost story, childhood neglect (past), house fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:21:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26013316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepointoftheneedle/pseuds/thepointoftheneedle
Summary: Betty and Jughead meet and fall in love in Cornwall but they are separated by a tragedy.  This is the story of how they overcome that tragedy and their own insecurities in order to make it work.  I like to set up completely hopeless situations and then write my way out of it to a happy ending.  It's all written and it does have a happy ending.  I wouldn't leave you hanging.  Pinkie promise.  Oh and Hotdog is in it.I have deliberately not tagged major character death despite it seeming like I should because no-one dies...as long as you read to the end!
Relationships: Betty Cooper/Jughead Jones
Comments: 87
Kudos: 69
Collections: 8th Bughead Fanfiction Awards - Nominees





	1. I Turned to Share the Transport

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Wordsworth's poem "Surprised by Joy"
> 
> Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind  
> I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom  
> But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,  
> That spot which no vicissitude can find?  
> Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—  
> But how could I forget thee?—Through what power,  
> Even for the least division of an hour,  
> Have I been so beguiled as to be blind  
> To my most grievous loss!—That thought’s return  
> Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,  
> Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,  
> Knowing my heart’s best treasure was no more;  
> That neither present time, nor years unborn  
> Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

_From the case files of Dr Abigail Burble_

_4p.m. (New Client Forsythe P. Jones henceforth in these notes JHJ)_

_JHJ is a twenty nine year old heterosexual white male. A creative artist. Financially stable. Patient requested & was granted permission to bring his dog to the session. Source of referral- Elizabeth Cooper. (NB EC was an intern in the practice five years ago. Now deceased.) Nature of the relationship somewhat unclear but certainly intimate. Patient seems to be suffering from delusion, recent history of hallucinations. Also self identifies as an adult survivor of complex multi type childhood abuse/ neglect. Bereavement? Depression? Addiction? Recommended weekly appointments. _

__

After the fire and the shock and the awful confusion, somehow he pulled it together enough to make it back to the States before he collapsed. He’d survived although he remembered little of it. He’d found a company who, for an outrageous fee, took complete charge of Hotdog’s relocation. He would have to wait two weeks to be reunited with him in New York but that gave him time to fly back, give notice on his apartment and look for a home that would be suitable for the large dog that his pal would soon be. He battled, knowing that he mustn’t think about Betty until they were safe and settled. He thought that he would have a breakdown, perhaps was already having one. It was good to have things that had to be done, an animal that needed him to look out for it. He focused on what Hotdog would need, a self contained yard, exercise spaces nearby, safe streets for them to walk around. He found a house in Bay Ridge, almost at random, not caring that his neighbours all seemed to be in their seventies, and he moved in right away. Only forward motion was preventing him from disintegrating. He hired a guy with a truck to help him drag his few sticks of furniture over from his much more desirable address in the East Village for a few dollars and, once he’d driven away, he sat on his couch and opened the Hemingway biography he’d been reading in England. The index card she’d given him was still there even though it was impossible that it should be and still more impossible that she had given it to him. He couldn’t think about the mind bending illogicality of it. Forward motion. She’d listed four therapists in the city. He called the first number on the list.

The receptionist agreed he could bring his dog as long as he was socialised. He said the dog was but he made no such promises for himself. She didn’t laugh. Too dark? If she had said no to the dog he would have rung the next number. He collected Hotdog from the cargo area at JFK the day before the appointment and was more relieved that he could express to be with him. He couldn’t stop reaching down to fondle his ears, rub his belly, kiss his head. The dog was pretty damn delighted too, his tail seemed to wag continually for twenty four hours, even when he was asleep on the bed next to his master. He was surprised by how much comfort he took in the animal. When he was called into the therapist’s consulting room he was still unsure about what he was going to say. How the hell could he explain anything that had happened to him when he couldn’t think about it without going out of his mind? She introduced herself as Dr Abigail Burble and reassured him with regard to confidentiality. She made some comments about her therapeutic approach and asked why he had decided to see her rather than any other therapist.

“You were recommended,” he said. “My friend, my ex girlfriend, my late girlfriend. Fuck I don’t know what I should call her. Betty Cooper gave me your name. She says I need help. Said. Whatever.”

Dr Burble’s face showed sympathy. “Oh I’m so sorry. She was a wonderful girl. She interned here when she began grad school. I was so devastated to hear what happened. It must be what, eighteen months ago?”

“Two years and sixteen days. Or sixteen days, depending on your point of view,” he replied, well aware that he sounded obtuse. “Anyway, I’m crazy. I guess. Or something very strange has happened to me. But I’m probably still crazy anyway.”

“Tell me why you have decided to enter therapy Mr Jones, but maybe the word crazy isn’t the most helpful. If anyone is crazy then everyone is. I think it’s just about how badly we’ve been broken and how well we’ve put the pieces back together.” Jug smiled. He remembered Betty telling him the exact same thing. She must have picked it up from Dr Burble. 

“I spent this summer falling in love with a girl who’s been dead for two years. No, you’re about to ask if I mean that metaphorically. I don’t. Falling in love with her, going out on dates with her, making love to her, holding her in my arms, kissing her hair, listening to her breathe as she slept. The opposite of a metaphor.” He knew that his eyes were wet with tears. Now he’d started to think of her, the barricades he’d been guarding were about to tumble. He stroked Hotdog’s ears and the pup turned and licked his face.

“Ok, so let’s begin then,” she said, her manner like an artisan rolling her sleeves, eager to begin the project.

“Christ, where to start? Do you want my dreams or do you want to know about my mother?” he asked, scrabbling together a defence with sarcasm, trying to convince himself that he wasn’t about to shatter into pieces.

“Well I’m not really that kind of a therapist but since you mention dreams why don’t we start there? Tell me one of your dreams.”

So he told her about the drowning dream and the first time he’d had it.

In the dream he was being sucked under cold, green water. He grappled to the surface, kicking frantically, gasping for a breath, only to be dragged back down. His eyes were wide with fear and he couldn’t make his limbs work as they should, the cold making them feel heavy and unresponsive, like they had only the loosest connection to him. His lungs burned as if the water were corrosive. He struggled again but failed to reach the air this time and then his heart ceased its frantic pounding, his pulse weakening and quavering as he took in deep draughts of the salty water, a powerless Hokusai rower in the claws of the great waves, saying farewell to the surface, to life, to the future.

He gasped awake, confused and disorientated as he always did after one of his nightmares, but this time nothing in the room was familiar. He had no idea where he was for a long, heart stopping moment until his mind reconstructed the jigsaw puzzle of disconnected impressions. England. Cornwall. Port something. He was on the couch in the cottage that he had rented and he wasn’t drowning. He was jet lagged and exhausted and he had a crick in his neck but he was very much alive. His heartbeat was loud in his ears and his throat felt raw. He guessed he had been screaming. That was a worryingly new level of crazy. He lit a cigarette and reviewed how he came to be there, in that cottage, in that strange country, as his body calmed from the nightmare.

A few days before he’d been in a fancy Midtown Manhattan eatery. As the sommelier had begun to walk away from the table to retrieve the $150 bottle of wine that his literary agent had selected Jug raised his index finger and said, “Can you bring me a beer please? The cheapest, most generic American beer you have. Thanks.”

“I will ask a waiter to attend to that at once sir,” the sommelier said haughtily and stepped away.

“Hey, I’m picking up the tab,” said Mark. “You don’t need to be a cheap date. And don’t pretend you don’t know that you were just rude to the sommelier.” 

Jug harrumphed. “I’m tilting at the windmills of pretension. And it all comes out of my take eventually. Don’t think I don’t know that. The wine, that Audi you pulled up in. Anyway I have simple, cheap, generic American tastes. I’d have been happy with a burger you know.”

Mark grinned, “Well the firm wants to treat you well. You’re an important client for us pal. We love you.”

“You love the percentage, you shark. I’ve got your number.” Jug’s words were belied by his smile. He’d worked with Mark for ten years and they respected each other’s professional skill. Jug would joke that Mark was a parasite and the agent would reply that he was part fixer, part enabler and that if it wasn’t for him Jug would be writing blurbs for the backs of cereal packets. The jokes were friendly but they also kept the relationship in a lane with which he was comfortable, bantering, superficial.

“Well Jughead? What’ve you got for me?” Mark’s tone conveyed that he expected there to be a new project well underway.

Jughead raised both hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Given that I got back from a forty six date bicoastal book tour ten days ago, not a hell of a lot. Christ Mark, am I ever allowed a break?”

“I think I know you better than that pal. Writing **is** a break for you. You’ve got something steeping in there. You always have.”

Jug nodded at a silent, deferential waiter who brought his beer. He did have the germ of an idea. “Well I’ve been thinking about England, about the coast. I don’t know where it’s come from. I’ve only ever been to London on a press junket. Then I was in the airport, in a hotel, in a cab and then back on a plane. Didn’t even see Big Ben. Anyway I’ve got this picture in my head, I guess it must be from a movie, waves against cliffs, little white painted houses braced against the wind, the trees all bent over and twisted. Maybe Powell and Pressburger?”

Jug’s story ideas almost always started with a setting. Once he had a location the rest just seemed to grow organically out of the soil of the place. Usually it was somewhere he knew, the East Village near his apartment, upstate New York where he’d grown up, Iowan corn fields, northern California, Thailand where he’d lived on a beach with a girl for six months, before he came to terms with his incapacity to form relationships, that affair fizzling out when he’d typed the last page. This sudden interest in Europe was a departure for him, somewhere he didn’t know at all. He really didn’t have the feel for it that he needed to make a start on the writing. That was why he hadn’t submitted an outline before the end of the tour as he usually did and why his agent was splurging on a fancy lunch. In the normal run of things he emailed a pitch, Mark negotiated an advance and he got to work. This felt different, like a departure.

Mark wasn’t going to be put off though. “OK, well go. Scope it out. That’ll be a break and a research trip in one. You can write it off against tax.”

“Oh I don’t know. It’s a long way to go. Maybe I should just write something else.”

“The muse has summoned you Jug. Pack a bag, hop a flight, I’ll wait to hear from you. Now are you sure you don’t want any of this? It’s the 2005 Michel Magnien Morey-Saint-Denis Les Chaffots.”

“I see your mouth moving but I’m getting nothing at all. No, thanks. Generic, cheap American.” Jug pointed to his chest with the beer bottle, ignoring the chilled glass which had been provided with it, and grinned.

Three days later he was failing to open a doll sized bag of pretzels six miles above the Atlantic ocean. He’d spent a couple of hours browsing pictures of properties to rent on Air BnB, finally finding one that looked a little like what he was imagining. It was a cottage by the sea, white with blue paintwork around the windows. There was a wooden structure around the door, somewhere out of the wind and sea spray to fumble for a door key he guessed. There was a photo of the yard, some hardy but windswept flowers and a patio set fashioned from weathered grey timber. He wasn’t too interested in the interior but he checked it had indoor plumbing and wifi. He wasn’t sure if ancient cottages in the rural wilds of the UK always did, he was sure he’d read about outdoor lavatories somewhere. The cottage seemed to have the essentials so he’d booked it through to the end of August and packed a bag. Jennifer, Mark’s PA, had been assigned the task of arranging his travel so he sent her the address of the cottage and within a couple of hours his phone pinged with a slightly bewildering array of eTickets and electronic boarding cards. It wasn’t until he was in his seat on the flight, reviewing the itinerary, that he realised that, once he’d landed at Heathrow, he was going to have to get three different trains and then take a cab. Five hours of travelling after a seven hour flight. He began to regret his impulsive decision.

He travelled through cityscapes and rolling fields, past the ocean, the waves almost at the train window, through heathland and copses of broad leaved trees. He had never been here and yet each new vista reminded him of a line or a phrase that he had read and never completely grasped before. He heard the “grating roar of pebbles”, saw the trees, “like unresting castles thresh in fullgrown thickness”, could imagine why this place might actually be “a precious stone set in the silver sea.”

At his destination at long last, he struggled out of a malodorous cab, wondering why the hell the upholstery was greasy. How did that happen? The guy wanted to be paid in cash so he riffled through the unfamiliar notes in his billfold, too tired to see straight, tipping far more than was necessary. The driver grunted, his prejudice about flashy yankees clearly being reinforced. Jug dragged his bag out of the trunk, unassisted by the driver, and struggled up the path as the cab honked and drove away. He’d had to show the driver the address on his phone, not hazarding a guess at the pronunciation of the village’s name. The drive from the train had taken an agonising forty minutes after he seemed to have been on the road since birth. He was desperate to sleep. The email from the woman who was renting him the place had told him that the key would be under the plant pot with the red geranium by the door. It seemed a little lax on the security front and he had no idea what kind of plant a geranium was but he moved a few likely looking pots and finally came up with a huge iron key that looked like it had been forged by a blacksmith not a locksmith. He opened the door and fell into a chintzy couch, a bank where the wild thyme grows, he thought whimsically as he fell asleep. 

An hour later he was waking, screaming, from the nightmare of drowning. He let the adrenaline dissipate for a few minutes until, stubbing out the cigarette he had lit to stop his hands from shaking, he dragged himself upstairs and found a bed made up with the most floral of bedding. This time the chintz made him think of an overgrown and weed strewn grave but he shrugged out of his clothes, lay down and fell instantly back to sleep. 

He opened his eyes to brilliant sunlight dazzling through the window. He struggled upright. The crick in his neck had metastasised, now his spine felt like a rusty, barnacled chain. He lumbered across the room to look out, reaching for his lighter and the pack of Marlboros. He could hear the sea, feet from the front door but this side of the cottage looked over a low promontory a hundred yards away where a huge cream painted house stood in splendid isolation. Alongside the lawns there was a cove, a strip of yellow sand caressed by rippling waves. As he watched, exhaling smoke out of the window, a youngish woman in a modest, blue one piece bathing suit appeared on the lawn, jogging barefoot down onto the beach. Her legs were magnificent, honey coloured and shapely. She threw a striped towel onto the sand and dragged her long blonde hair back, securing it with a tie that she must have been wearing around her wrist. She ran out into the surf without hesitation, dropping into the water and swimming with a strong, steady crawl out to sea. He shuddered as his nightmare resurfaced and he remembered the bone chilling cold of the dream ocean. He watched as her arms flickered against the shining steel of the water until the sun, glittering off the waves with eye watering brilliance, hid her from his gaze. Within moments another girl, dark hair, wearing a sundress, appeared on the lawn and her voice carried on the still morning air. “Hey Betty. Betty, come ON! We’re leaving in like fifteen. Betty!” It took a moment before he realised that he was hearing an American voice. What were the odds? The first girl was striking back to shore now, swimming quickly and efficiently, cresting the waves and then plunging downwards with them as she approached the beach. Her limbs, previously so golden, were pink with the chill as she emerged from the water. She snatched up her towel and rubbed her hair, yelling, “OK V calm down! I’m coming.” Also an American. Was everyone American here? As the girl disappeared into the impressive colonnade at the front of the house Jug realised he’d been gawping at a strange girl in her swimsuit like he was a throwback to the seventies and she was a contestant in a beauty pageant. She wouldn’t have been out of place, he thought before telling himself not to be such a creep. Shaking his head in self reproach, he distracted himself with an audit of his accommodation. 

The cottage was tiny. He kept banging his head on low lintels over doorways. The front door opened into a room that served as both living room and dining room. There was a small desk, a folding dining table and the couch on which he had begun his disturbed night. A deeply recessed window looked out over a low sea wall to the ocean, stretching away boundless and oblivious. After his dream it made him shudder for a moment as if he were chilled despite the already warm day. There was a narrow kitchen with wooden cupboards crowding the walls and a back door leading out into the paved yard. At the top of the cramped and twisting staircase were two tiny bedrooms and a bathroom. The bathtub was green. There was no shower. He checked twice. The bedroom he had chosen at random last night looked over the swimmer’s house and her beach and then up through a stand of trees to an imposing red and white striped tower. It wasn’t a lighthouse, there was no lamp. If there had been then he wouldn’t have slept at all. The other bedroom looked out to sea, a picture postcard harbour along the coast to the right. 

He wondered if he could scare up coffee from the pokey kitchen. He found a printed note addressed to Mr FP Jones which made him think about his dad, drying out in a facility Jug was paying for so he could limit his interaction with the serpent king to signing the payment orders. The note bade him welcome in comic sans. That told Jug all he needed to know about the writer. It indicated that the kitchen was supplied with some basics to tide him over until he could get provisions. He surveyed the “basics” and decided that either the writer was an eccentric or Brits and Americans were separated by not only the common language but also by ideas of the fundamentals of human life. There was no coffee, only loose tea, which struck him as a deliberate jab, possibly revenge for the Boston Tea Party. Bizarrely there was no bread. There was some sort of yellow cake with dried fruit studded through it. There was a small container of milk in the strangely diminutive refrigerator and a pat of butter which made the lack of bread still less comprehensible. He pulled off some of the cake with his fingers. It was strange and dry but not offensive. He wasn’t even going to go near the tea. He chugged the milk instead.

A few minutes later, walking beside the sea wall towards the harbour in search of coffee, a vintage yellow convertible passed him, so close and so fast that he felt the draught on his skin. It was being driven by a red haired guy in a Knicks hoodie who was yelling something above the roar of the engine. Riding shotgun was the dark haired woman, her blonde friend in the back, her head thrown back as she enjoyed the wind against her skin. He was instantly irritated by them, loud yankees hurtling about the quiet roads making an exhibition of themselves like Mr Toad. He continued on his way, now feeling justified in ignoring his compatriots next door. He would have done so anyway but now he had the moral justification not to feel like a tool about it.

The air was glassy in its clarity. The sea sparkled. Everything seemed scrubbed and scoured by wind and sand. A few fishing boats bobbed in the harbour, their occupants calling to each other and erupting into raucous laughter. An older woman was sweeping a stone stairway outside her house and smiled and paused in her work to let him pass without being covered in dust and scraps of dried seaweed. He nodded in acknowledgement. The whole scene looked like an illustrator’s version of the English seaside, idealised to the point of unreality.

At the tiny grocery store he felt a degree of culture shock that surprised him. He felt much more foreign than he had expected. Eventually the young woman behind the counter called out, “Can I help you?” in a way which was not actively hostile so he spread his hands in appeal and said, “I’m a little lost. I’d be grateful. I want coffee.”

“Oh an American. You do like your cawfee don’t you?” He smiled indulgently at the attempt to imitate his accent. That seemed to be what people expected when they mocked folks they didn’t know.

“Yeah, there’s a French press at the place I’m renting. What should I put in that?”

“You mean a cafetière right? Like a glass jar with a plunger?” He nodded and the woman passed him a packet of coffee. “Right what else do you need?”

They worked together to assemble a large box of provisions which was worryingly lacking his convenient staples. Apparently instant ramen and mac’n cheese in a box were not really a thing here. Still he had tagliatelle and jars of tomato sauce, he had something like graham crackers, he had eggs and cheese and bread and chips. He grabbed a few boxes of miscellaneous cereal, laundry soap and the other basics of human life and asked if he could have it all delivered. “Sure, where are you staying?” 

He gave his name and the address and then said, “Next door to the other Americans but I don’t plan to socialise with them.”

She looked at him sharply with a strange, rather shocked expression and then said, “Wow, dark.” Somehow he had lost the thread of the conversation, suspecting he’d made a faux pas but unsure exactly how.” OK Mr Jones, I’ll get that delivered this afternoon. If you go out, leave the door unlocked, Bob’ll leave it in the kitchen for you.” He must have looked stunned at that idea because she said, “It’s perfectly safe. This isn’t the Bronx or somewhere. No-one locks their door.”

He headed back to the cottage, clutching the package of coffee. He needed to set up his writing space. Once inside, he recaffeinated while he surveyed the options. The desk downstairs against a wall was no good. He needed a view. With nothing to look at he’d stand up, walk about, look at his phone and nothing at all would get written. In fact the room was no good for work; he could see into the kitchen. He’d be thinking about dinner and the chapter would keep drifting into descriptions of the spongy texture of a warm donut or the glossiness of the noodles in a Pad Thai. He’d been there before; his juvenilia had mostly been written in a diner and it contained far too many lengthy descriptions of meat juices soaking into burger buns and the penetrating pungency of frying onions. He’d have to move the desk upstairs. The room he’d slept in wouldn’t do. He was too interested in the house next door; it would distract him. He dragged the desk into the bedroom with the sea view. Then he had to get rid of the bed, wrangling the mattress out and propping the frame against the wall. A bed in the writing room was no damn use at all. He’d lie down “just for a moment” and four hours later he’d wake, groggy and confused, to a blank document and a crushing awareness of his own failure. He found a saucer that he could use as an ashtray, unpacked his laptop and set up the desk with the books he needed constantly to hand, Roget’s, The Elements of Style and his Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, all of them tattered and coffee stained. He rarely needed to refer to them but he couldn’t settle himself without them. They were his totem objects, never out of his reach. He could have used online resources but that would open the abyss of the net and he would fall into it, spiralling through the nine circles of Twitter to come to a beached and despairing rest in some backwater of Reddit, his muse bludgeoned and bleeding out onto that stony, hateful ground. 

He sat and wrote a description of the village as he had observed it that morning. It was a writing exercise he used a lot and sometimes these passages developed into a story. That wasn’t happening today but, as he always did, he sat at the desk for seven hours only closing the laptop once the clock showed 5.15p.m. It was a discipline upon which he insisted. For seven hours six days a week, unless he was on one of the interminable book tours or travelling, he would sit and write or wait to write or silently reproach himself for being unable to write. No exceptions, no excuses. At the end of his work day he had two thousand words of perfectly serviceable description but without a narrative there was no point in telling a reader about the glittering water or the jaunty boats or the screeching fucking seagulls. The words sat there, inert, without feeling, much like him, he thought wryly. 

Time to stop and reboot the system. At home he might ride his motorcycle, go out to a diner or take a walk. Anything to be in motion, seeing and hearing things, having some kind of experience that could put the defibrillator paddles to the creative pulse in his brain. He wasn’t sure what there was to do out here in the wilds of nowhere but he was pretty sure there weren’t any diners. On the spur of the moment he reached for his swimming shorts. He’d throw himself into the ocean, that ought to shake something loose.

He stepped out of the front door and up to the sea wall. The wall was low on the cottage side but on the ocean side the drop was at least five feet onto shingle. A hundred yards along, a narrow set of stone steps were cut into the wall so he jogged over and climbed down, leaning into the wall, damp with seaweed and studded with limpets. Gaining the narrow strip of sand he stepped towards the water, his dream returning to him for a moment, until he impatiently dismissed it from his mind and strode over sand and shingle into the water. It was pretty damn cold. There was a tricky moment at mid thigh when a wave caught him and he thought that his masculinity might be permanently impaired but he simply threw himself into the next wave, letting it crash over his head, the ice cream headache distracting him from an almost prepubescent situation in his shorts. He struck out to sea, remembering blondie’s economical and even stroke and well aware that his own was a little more on the splashy side, making up for his lack of skill with a surfeit of enthusiasm. Once he was out from the shore he turned and, pushing his wet hair from his eyes, he looked back at the cottage. It seemed further away than he had expected. Then he glanced at the big house. The blonde girl was on the lawn, waving her arm. He wondered if he should wave back but decided she must be waving to someone else, maybe someone out of his eye line around the spit on which the house stood. He took a deep breath and started back for the shore. He had only taken a few strokes when he became painfully aware that something was badly wrong. His feet seemed to be weighted down. Struggling to kick, he was making almost no progress. He seemed to be on the edge of some kind of turbulence that wouldn’t let him move away. He put more effort into his stroke but it had no effect. His heart was pounding and not just with the exertion. He struggled again and a wave crashed over his head, throwing him instantly back into the nightmare. He found himself preparing to submit just as he had done then. His mouth was full of water, salty, alien, deadly. It seemed a stupid, careless way to die. He’d thought maybe the bike would kill him; that would have been fair. He was reckless. At other times he thought maybe it would be the cigarettes. That would be less romantic. He was in good company, Jeff Buckley, Percy Shelley, Hart Crane but he was irritated to drown like a total fucking idiot because he hadn’t paid attention to a pretty unambiguous premonition.

Then, as clearly, as if she were next to him, over his own gasping breath, he heard a woman’s voice. “Relax, turn onto your back. Don’t struggle. I’m coming.” He didn’t have too much struggle left so he obeyed. Floating on his back wasn’t easy, the choppy waves still crashed over his face and made him panic, but it was a damn sight easier than struggling against whatever was pulling him away from shore and down, under the surface. It felt like hours that he floated there, helpless, but rationally he knew that he didn’t have hours left. A hand grabbed his wrist and he breathed in a lungful of brine and turned over, looking up into very angry green eyes. The blonde girl was in a kayak, panting with exertion and holding an oar like she planned to do him violence with it. “Grab the lines and lay over the deck you fucking jerk and I’ll take you in.”

“Thanks,” he croaked. Her anger seemed a small price to pay for the avoidance of imminent death. She paddled in quickly, him draped across the craft like a half drowned kitten. Once she reached the shallows she reached forward and shook his shoulder. “Can you stand? How much water did you take on?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Not too much. Thanks. I’m sorry”

“Oh my God, are you an American? Christ, the white American male, your motto really is never let complete fucking cluelessness stand in your way.” She was out of the kayak now pushing it towards the shore as he stood, unsteadily, in the shallow water, doubtless looking as much of a dork as he felt.

“Look I’m really sorry that you had to come out for me. I’m grateful. But you don’t need to be quite such a …”

“Hey, just don’t. If you call me a bitch I will definitely have to strike you with this paddle. It might kill you.”

“I wouldn’t…I would never…I was going to say virago.”

“Oh a pretentious, pseudo intellectual sexist term. Well that’s much better. I begin to wish I’d left you out there to drown. Don’t swim where you don’t know the water. There’s a rip from off this cove all the way to the harbour in Portscatho. I tried to yell to you when I saw you go down the steps but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

“No, I saw you waving but I didn’t think you meant me. I saw you swim this morning so it didn’t occur to me that it was dangerous. I’m renting the cottage just over there, Valerian Cottage. I mean I happened to see you, I wasn’t watching you. I mean I did watch but just for a second, like not in a creepy way. Oh fuck it. I’ll go home.”

“And that was how I met Betty Cooper,” he told Dr Burble, smiling at the memory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have played very fast and loose with the geography here. I've moved a day-mark round from Gribben Head and moved Betty's house from Menabilly. See that would be a lot of work out in the real world. That's why stories are better.
> 
> A note on the provisions left by Jug's host. In Cornwall older people would often have two breakfasts, like hobbits. First breakfast would be cake and tea. Second breakfast, after early farm chores or the preparation of fishing equipment would be a substantial cooked meal. So Jug has been left a saffron cake which is usually served spread with butter. It's not as odd as he thinks it is.  
> Oh and he remembers quotations on the way to the cottage, Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach  
> and Phillip Larkin's wonderful poem The Trees (https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20151201-a-beautiful-animation-of-philip-larkins-the-trees) as well as the Shakespeare.


	2. My Heart’s Best Treasure

After she’d pulled his sorry ass out of the ocean and he’d insulted her and admitted to being a creep and a voyeur she stared at him for a moment before bursting into gales of laughter. Obviously his near drowning and subsequent gauche inanity was a source of amusement for her. “Ok, ok, let’s try this again. I’m Betty, it’s nice to meet you.” She put out her hand and he smiled a little cautiously as he shook it. 

“Jughead, Jughead Jones. Pleased to meet you too Betty. Thank you for saving me from the gelid embrace of a merciless ocean.”

She looked at him intently, not bothering to disguise the curiosity or the amusement in her eyes. “Come on Jughead Jones. I’ll make you a coffee and you can dry off. And I’ll give you a key to the lawn gate. If you feel like swimming in the future, you can set off from here. As long as you set out north, away from the harbour you’ll be fine. It’s a private beach but I’ll tell the others that an American with a dime store sense of self preservation but a Bergdorf's vocabulary might turn up.”

She took him through a side door into what looked to be the staff area of the old house, there was a door that said “Boot Room” because apparently English homes needed a whole room for boots. As they passed a utility room with laundry machines she threw him a striped towel, warm from the dryer. He wasn’t sure what he should cover up with it and finally he just hung it round his neck, being bare chested in a stranger’s kitchen seemed pretty weird and to tie it round his waist implied a naked vulnerability that he couldn’t countenance. Then she led him through an archway into a huge kitchen. There was a black metal stove that seemed to be pumping out heat despite the warm day. He must have raised an eyebrow because she shrugged. It’s like a furnace, kind of. You have to keep it going or there’s no hot water. It’s temperamental and cranky but there’s always a hot oven. Want muffins? I mean American muffins not those weird hockey pucks they call muffins here.”

Jughead nodded, a little overwhelmed by her take charge attitude, and she reached into a full sized refrigerator, not a play house one like he had at the cottage, and pulled out a bowl, apparently full of muffin batter ready to go. “What do you feel like? Blueberry? Chocolate chip? Banana, apple cinnamon?”

Twenty minutes later he was burning his fingers on the molten fruit in a blueberry muffin and listening to Betty’s life story. She was in England on a Fulbright Scholarship. She’d been in Cambridge for two years and now she was putting the finishing touches to her doctoral thesis. It had something to do with the norm of reciprocity which, he gathered, was the idea that people feel compelled to be helpful to someone who helped them first. She’d carried out a study that he didn’t quite follow and she’d found out something new that seemed to challenge some of the accepted theories. He nodded but she was so deep into the material that it was kind of hard to catch up, wrapped in a towel after a near death experience. She must have seen his expression because she stopped and laughed at herself. “Anyway, it’s psychology. And my old buddy and his wife had rented this place for the summer so they invited me to come down and stay, get the thing finished, help out with their baby daughter. He’s a songwriter and there’s a recording studio in the annexe so it’s kind of perfect. Now tell me what Jughead Jones is doing in Portscatho. Other than trying, unsuccessfully, to drown himself.”

“I’m a writer. I’ve got the ghost of an idea about the place, not really even an idea yet. And I’m just finished with a book tour and New York is hot in August so I figured, travel, countryside, the ocean. What’s not to like?”

She looked at him a little impressed. “What have you written? Anything famous?”

“Well let’s see, the most successful was Aulon Raid but there was Rain in Soho, Possum at Night…”

“Oh my God! I read that! I thought you were younger. Sorry, rude! I loved that book. It was so creepy and dark. Wow. Forsythe Jones in my kitchen!”

“Jughead, really. I wrote Possum when I was in college so that’s probably why you thought…I’m only twenty nine though. For another few weeks anyway.”

“Ha, counting much? The big three zero looming a little large is it?” 

“No, it’s fine. It doesn’t bother me at all. Very little does,” he said, thinking to himself that that was the root of the difficulty that the world had with him. He wrote about feeling, drew emotions out of others with his words, understood how to make people cry or laugh but, as for himself, he felt almost nothing. In a way the fear he’d experienced out there in the sea was a relief. He could still feel something apparently. That’d been what Trula had said, watching him with her arms folded, as he packed his suitcase in the beach bungalow in Thailand. “Well I would say it was nice knowing you Jughead, but I never did, did I? I thought that you were mysterious, that you had inner depths but you’re just dead inside aren’t you? No-one at home in there at all. I suppose you’ll have forgotten me by the time your flight lands won’t you? Make a note in your fucking journal. ‘Today I broke Trula’s heart. And I don’t give a shit.”

He wished it wasn’t true, that he could say that he had loved her, that he was upset that it hadn’t worked but he hadn’t and he really wasn’t. He was just one of those weirdos who didn’t play well with others, a self sufficient introvert. Some important part of what made a human being had just been left out in him, but it was ok. He was doing pretty well without it and he could fake it when he needed to, force out a tear at a funeral, tell his sister he felt proud of her at her graduation, look concerned when Sweetpea came off the bike yet again and he had to pay another hospital bill, but actually when he turned his attention inwards there was simply a void, an absence. No-one home like Trula had said. And yet…the night terrors, the risks he took on the bike, the constant feeling that he was a fraud who was about to be found out all suggested that maybe there was someone home but that person was a scared and angry little boy, hiding, alone and hungry in the dark.

He pushed the thought aside and drank his coffee and ate more muffins that was probably polite and then stood to leave. “Thanks Betty, for the coffee and the baking and for saving my life out there. I’m sorry I was a pain in the ass.”

“OK, make it up to me then. Archie and Veronica are having a party tomorrow night. Come.”

“Oh I’m so not a party guy. My ideal social engagement is me, potato chips and the new biography of Hemingway. I’m a total washout in a crowd.”

“No, that’s it! Me too. If you come we can sit in here, get to the hors d’oeuvres first, I’ll have done my social duties and I don’t need to get groped by the handsy guy they always invite or talk to the sad singles they’re trying to fix me up with. Come on Jughead. You do owe me.” She looked at him with those penetrating green eyes again and he couldn’t find the words to put her off. He found, unexpectedly, disorientedly, confusingly, that he didn’t want to disappoint her. So he said yes.

_From the case files of Dr Abigail Burble_  
_4p.m. JHJ. Session #8_  
_JHJ spoke about how he came to accept that therapy might benefit him. He formed a friendship with EC (when? where? Unclear.) whose insights helped him to see that he might function more effectively if he was able to address past trauma. His account of EC resonates with my own experience of her but his narrative does not cohere with reality in significant matters of fact. However he has made progress with regard to his social isolation. He has been for non work related drinks with a professional associate and reports that they talked about their personal lives._

He settled into the Bay Ridge place. He wrote. Mark liked the chapters he sent and kept saying that this would be the book that finally got the awards noms. He said that he’d wept when he read it. He’d never said anything like that before. They went out for drinks together, off the clock, and Mark told him that he was about to become a father and they actually talked about how that made him feel. Scared shitless, apparently. As they left the bar, Mark shoulder bumped him and they said they’d do it again, and they did, almost every week. He was pleased with the artistic approval but he was also pleased to have a friend. He didn’t tell Mark that his girl was dead, just that he’d met someone but that he hadn’t been in a place where he could be what she needed. He said he was working on that and gave him Abigail’s details, suggested that he talk to her about his fear of letting his girlfriend and baby down.

He went to the dog park, walked Hotdog on the streets around his house, spoke to the neighbours. Sometimes women hit on him and he said that he and Hotdog had better get home because his girlfriend would be waiting dinner on them. He longed for that to be true. He walked towards the house, imagining how it would be to hang the leash on the hook by the door and call out “Baby, we’re back,” and have her come out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishtowel, enveloped in the aroma of chicken parmigiana, smiling and kissing the dog and then him. That would have been a perfect moment. If he had that he could die happy.

He’d been talking with Abigail about Betty, about how she had pulverised all his bulwarks and battlements. It made him sit up late, thinking about those first few days of their impossible friendship. It hurt but in a good way. He smiled as he cried. He was coming to suspect that some pain might be valuable. 

On the night of his near drowning he’d got back to the cottage by the sea to find that, surprisingly, he had not been burgled and there was a crate of groceries on the kitchen counter along with a six pack and a note that said “Welcome to Portscatho Mr Jones.” He felt pretty damn welcome what with the rescue and Betty’s baked goods and now the free beer, so he cracked one open, lit a cigarette and took a bath like he was an exhausted mom whose hubby had taken the kids to the ice cream parlour. He was a little concerned by the fact that he had accepted Betty’s invitation to a party; he liked her pretty well but he wasn’t going to start something with the next door neighbour only for her to find that he didn’t have a heart of gold, or a heart at all. They’d have to avoid each other at the store when she saw through him. He decided he’d go, have a drink, make nice for an hour and then come home to an early night, alone. 

The morning of the party he got up and wrote, his courage not equal to the challenge of a swim despite her invitation and the gate key on his dresser. He wrote about the impassive sea outside his window and, obliquely, about the cold ocean inside himself. There was still no plot, no narrative, but he felt like he was working through something, like maybe he’d needed a glimpse of his mortality to get the motor turning. He’d done his seven hours by four in the afternoon so he struck out on a hike up the hills at the back of the cottage. He got to the tower where a sign informed him that it was a day-mark. Apparently it was a maritime aid which sounded amusingly like a marital aid. It was an impressively phallic tower so there were jokes to be made by a cruder, less subtle, artist than him. He carried on along the ridge of hills for an hour or so, heading back as the air cooled a little and a light breeze started to shake the ripening barley in the fields with a dry whisper. As he descended to the cottage he could hear soft music and a hum of conversation drifting across from next door. There were lights in the trees at the edge of the lawn and people were strolling about holding wine glasses. He felt like Nick Carraway, watching, half expecting Gatsby to appear. 

He changed into his one decent button down shirt and chinos, aware that some of the guys had been wearing tuxes. If he wasn’t fancy enough he’d apologise and come right back. He wouldn’t hate that outcome. As a matter of fact when he stepped out of the front door Betty was on the lawn just across the cove. She smiled and waved and her eyes swept down his body. There was a sensation in his stomach when they did that. He remembered that he hadn’t eaten lunch so his belly was probably anticipating the silly little pastries that would be served at a songwriter’s soiree. 

A few minutes later they had retreated to a nook in the kitchen, far enough away from the dragon of a stove to be out of the blaze of its superheated breath. Jug was rejecting sandwiches on the basis of being too green or too pink or just phoney while Betty laughed at his outraged expressions of horror and disgust. He realised that he liked her laugh too much so he immediately stopped joking around. Eventually she found a tray of some unfamiliar local offering, sausages, wrapped in flakey, golden pastry and then cut into small morsels one could almost forgo chewing before swallowing. Betty looked at the mealy meat suspiciously and returned to a plate full of cucumber sandwiches cut into dainty triangles. He liked the way she ate, she wasn’t coy about it. Her teeth were white and strong and she bit into the sandwich and chewed like a human being not like she was ashamed to consume anything. He was staring at her mouth so he shook himself out of his reverie and asked her how she liked living in England.

“I suppose I’m just relieved to be away from home. My family’s kind of a car crash. I’ve got this domineering but irresponsible mother, so she’ll impose all these expectations on me which I internalise and feel bad for disregarding, but she’s also a total flake. You can’t look to her for help. My dad’s a doormat who eventually got sick of it and just walked out, off the grid, gone. The worm turned. I don’t blame him. All of which explains why I’m interested in psychology and why I choose to study on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.”

“East coast girl then?” 

“Baltimore, then Yale for college.”

He whistled through his teeth. “Ivy League. Very impressive.”

“You?”

“Originally a little town in upstate New York, not too far from Albany. Then Iowa. The writers’ programme. Hated the goddamn corn but I stuck it out for six years. Now New York, when I’m not here.”

“Did you leave someone behind there? Girlfriend? Boyfriend?”

“No, who’d have me? How about you?” She looked at him with those green appraising eyes. He’d given something away there. He wasn’t sure what, but he realised that she was much smarter than the people who he usually deflected and diverted from getting to know him.

“No. I was seeing someone in Cambridge for a while but, you know that feeling when you just seem to be on different pages? He kept looking in jeweller’s store windows and suggesting mini breaks to Paris and I was just getting waves of dread. So we broke up.” She was sharing more than him but what could he say to her? He could say that he’d never been on the same page with another human, that he suspected maybe he was a psychopath, that she should run for her life. That was the idea that he sometimes dwelt on, feared.

“Hey, shall we go outside?” she asked. “We could sit on the beach. It’s still warm.” He nodded and she grabbed a rug and some cushions from a box near the door, handed him a couple of beers and they headed out, music playing from somewhere at the other side of the house. “Ah Archie’s playing them the new stuff,” she said as they passed, an affectionate expression on her face. He was sure he recognised the tune, something he’d heard in stores and bars a couple of years ago. Archie wasn’t the most original talent in the world apparently.

They settled themselves on the shingle at the top of the cove, the water lapping the shore, and she started to build a cairn with some of the pebbles. “So Mr Jones, tell me why you’re a writer,” she said as she selected a flat stone and placed it carefully before choosing the next to add to her construction.

“I can’t do anything else. Nothing legal anyway.” He laughed sharply. It even rang a little false in his own ears and she certainly looked up from her building project, intrigued. He was going to have to give her something else if she was going to let that drop. “OK, seriously? It’s a way to exert control. So here I have no power to alter the course of events. I can respond but I can’t be proactive. The sea can drag me out and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. We’re all here, bobbing about, waiting to drown. In a book I’m omnipotent. I can say “Fuck that guy,” and let him drown but I can have him be unexpectedly strong and determined and fight his way back in against the rip. I can have him rescued by a beautiful woman.” He watched her to see if the line landed and if it would deflect her.

“Oh Jones, there it is. I knew you were dangerous,” she laughed. 

“Is that why you invited me? Or was it to practise your dark, head shrinking arts?” He raised an eyebrow.

“I invited you because you’re pretty and interesting. And I don’t need to psychoanalyse you. You’re kind of an open book.”

“Really? I doubt that.” No-one had ever considered him easy to read. He wondered how she had so misunderstood him.

“Oh well I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to give you a diagnosis right here. And I’m not a therapist so I couldn’t follow up with a treatment plan with any degree of confidence. I assume you haven’t had any therapy?”

He snorted. “No, no therapy. I’m fine. Perfectly happy and well adjusted. Peachy keen.”

“Hmmm,” she replied and it made him a little mad at her. He was protecting her by faking normalcy; she shouldn’t call him out for that.

“OK, you barely know me. You can’t just decide I’m wrong in the head without any evidence.” That was when she put out a hand and touched his forearm where he had rolled his shirt sleeves. In his mind a voice was yelling, “Brush her hand away, stand up, walk away, go home, not to the cottage, get a flight, go home right now,” but he just sat there, on the beach, looking at her fingers and wanting to kiss them. 

“Jug, we’re all wrong in the head, everyone is. It’s just a case of how badly we’ve been broken and how well we’ve put the shards back together. Did you say you were a Hemingway guy? What’s that quotation? The world breaks everyone…”

He nodded, still looking at her hand on his arm. ““The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially.”

“Exactly. My thesis supervisor has that in a frame on her desk…well the first part anyway. Being broken is inevitable. It’s what happens when we engage with the world. Being alive is a process of recovery.”

“Well not for me. Like I say, peachy keen, thanks.” He grinned at her but he could tell that the smile hadn’t reached his eyes. He wondered what she thought was wrong with him, why she thought he should get help. He wouldn’t, obviously. They would want to rake over stuff that he had buried pretty effectively. Sure, it reared up now and then. His publisher would forward a letter with an Ohio postmark and he’d have to take the bike out and force out the bad memories with adrenaline. His dad would turn up, drunk, with another twenty two year old cocktail waitress and he’d have to wait for him to pass out, pay her off and go pick a fight in a bar. By the time his knuckles healed he’d be ok again and his dad would have taken off to some new crisis. Or the dreams would get really bad for a few weeks and he’d take two or even three times the safe dose of his sleeping pills, sleep for couple of days and wake up with a hangover and some gaps in his memory. All of that was vastly to be preferred to laying on some doctor’s couch while they unravelled his whole fucking personality and underneath found that there was nothing at all. He suspected that he wasn’t damaged by his trauma, he was just the scar tissue. If they excised that then he would quite simply cease existing at all.

She looked at him intently for a long moment. In the silence he imagined the conversation as it was about to play out, her trying to diagnose him, persuade him to seek help, him pretending to get mad but really feeling only indifference. Maybe he’d storm off like that voice kept insisting, she’d feel bad. Maybe he’d let her apologise in his bedroom in Valerian Cottage. Maybe he’d just shun her, make her feel worse. She surprised him. She laughed and rubbed her hand lightly over his arm. “Hey Jones I’m sorry. It’s kind of an occupational hazard. I feel the need to butt into people’s heads where I’m not wanted. You’re fine. You said it. Peachy keen. Wanna swim?”

He wasn’t entirely sure what was being offered. She always seemed to have him struggling to catch up, on the back foot. He liked it, her unpredictability was interesting. “I don’t have my swim shorts,” he said, watching her expression.

“I’m going in in my underwear. You could do that, or give a girl a treat if you prefer. I don’t care. I’m not saying I won’t look though.” She grinned cheekily and the tension that had been building between them was broken. He laughed and stripped down to his boxers. They swam and although she was beautiful and he wanted her, she somehow made it innocent and fun. They seemed to have become friends despite his determination that they shouldn't.

After their swim he’d gone home to bed and slept well without pharmaceutical help for the first time in months. He guessed it must be the sea air and all the exercise. As he’d left she’d asked him if he wanted to go exploring when he was done writing the next day. She said she’d be the next best thing to a local guide. He hesitated, sensing that his equilibrium was threatened by her, she was too smart and too interested in what made him tick, but she’d grinned and he very much wanted to go. He couldn’t remember when he last wanted anything. Finally he nodded and said he would come over when he was done, sometime around three in the afternoon.

The next day he wrote about Betty’s green eyes. He was feeling the danger again and considered going over to the house to say he couldn’t make their excursion. Then he decided that was foolish and weak. He could be casual friends with an interesting woman for a couple of weeks without making everything weird.

She was sitting, holding her friends’ baby, on a stone bench in the shade of a plane tree when he called round, letting himself in through the gate as she had instructed him. He thought that it was an attractive picture, a beautiful girl smiling at a laughing child in an English garden. Anyone but him would be affected by that scene. He approached and she stood to greet him. “Oh hi Jughead. Look hold the baby for a sec would you? I’ll grab a sweater and tell Veronica I’m going.”

He stepped back quickly, holding his hands up as if she had pointed a weapon at him rather than held out an infant. “Oh no, I can’t…I don’t know how…”

She laughed. “You’re a thirty year old, grown man. This child’s six months old. You cannot be afraid of her. Now be an adult and hold the baby.”

He did as he was told but the panic in his chest rivalled the fear when he had almost drowned. Betty disappeared into the house, leaving him alone with this fragile, vulnerable thing. He couldn’t be responsible for it. He’d drop her or she’d choke and he wouldn’t be able to help, somehow he’d hurt her. He stood absolutely still, supporting the baby’s head with the palm of his hand, staring at her like she was some kind of lethal reptile that might strike if he dropped her gaze. Eventually Betty returned with the dark haired girl, Veronica, and he was able to give the baby to her, his arms and legs feeling weak and shaky with the sudden release of tension. “Veronica, this is Jughead Jones, Jughead, Veronica Lodge Andrews, attorney, momma, best friend.” 

Veronica leaned in and air kissed him in the vicinity of either cheek in such a stylised manner that he barely flinched. “Good to meet you Jughead. Thanks for looking after the munchkin. You two going out?”

“I thought we’d drive over to Port Holland. We’ll have a stroll, go for a beer maybe. Won’t be late.”

They did as she suggested. There was a fishing village with a cove, a walk up a hillside covered with bracken and the promise on their return of a glass of beer outside a traditional English pub. As they walked they talked about books. He told her why he liked Hemingway and she raved about the confessional poets, especially Plath and Sexton. He remarked that they couldn’t have more different taste, Her favourites both so focussed on mapping their emotional interior while Hemingway’s prose was so sparse as to be telegraphic, them focused on the inside, Hemingway always the thing undescribed in a surveyed landscape. She disagreed. “The thing is with Hemingway that the emotion is all there, he doesn’t need to say it, you feel it through the space he leaves. He lets it speak for itself. By giving you everything else you can fill in that void. Like at the end of A Farewell to Arms, when Henry walks back to the hotel alone, oh my god, you feel everything.” He realised that he liked her precisely because she felt so much. It was fascinating to him that someone could be so free to feel and yet somehow survive the world. He remembered that kind of feeling as a child, his heart crushing love for his baby sister, managing to earn a rare nod of acknowledgement from his mother and feeling hope that perhaps she might like him a little now. But with them gone, he was alone, looking after himself by the time he was thirteen, dodging his drunk father and his scary friends. All he felt for years was fear and shame and no-one could sustain that. Eventually one's heart wizened and simply disappeared.

The sunlight was softening as day slid into evening and they returned to the pub by the sea. “So Jug. Tell me your story. You know all about me,” she said, as they sat looking out over the ocean. He had expected her to begin his dissection at some point and now the tension gripped his shoulders. He was accomplished in deflecting and distracting but she was a more worthy adversary than most people who claimed interest in his personality or lack of it.

“Nothing of any interest. Small town boy goes to college, writes book, gets some good reviews, publishers, book tours, here I am.” He tapped the table with either hand to put an emphatic end to the interrogation and saw her register that he had shut it down. He wanted to sigh with relief but she wasn’t finished.

“Ok, I see.” Her mouth was set in a determined line. “If you won’t give me the origin story, just tell me exactly what you did today. Take your time. I want all of the detail.”

“I got up and did all the usual stuff…”

“Detail please.”

“Christ ok. It hurts me to give extraneous detail. I’m a writer, we skip all that shit. I got up at seven because the goddamn seagulls were driving me crazy with the shrieking. I took a bath in a green tub which makes you feel dirtier than before you began.”

“No shower?” 

“No, weirdly, no shower in the cottage. I mean, what the actual fuck?” Betty looked a little shocked by the bizarre facilities at Valerian Cottage. “Anyway, bathroom stuff, can we draw a veil?”

“Please do.”

“Kitchen, breakfast. I ate something that looked and tasted like a block of pulped cardboard.”

She laughed, “Weetabix, right? That stuff is heinous. Why is there no taste of any kind? Just dryness that suddenly gets activated by milk and becomes mush.”

Yes, never touching it again.” He shuddered, “I drank three cups of coffee. I smoked a cigarette. I worked for seven hours, during which time I got approximately four thousand words down, three thousand of which I deleted before leaving my desk. I smoked about five more cigarettes, blowing the smoke out of the window like a high schooler with a joint. I said I didn’t smoke when I booked the cottage. I came to your house. We walked. Now I’m here.”

“A clear report Mr Hemingway. Thank you. What are you writing about?”

“Ah well, that’s a secret. If I talk about it too much then I can’t write it. It’s like the air in a balloon. I have to let it out or I’ll explode but once it’s gone, it’s gone. If I tell you then it won’t be there to be written. I mean I don’t know if that’s just me but it’s always been that way.”

“Are you happy?” It seemed to come out of nowhere. He looked at her, shocked. It’s not the kind of question you ask a relative stranger. He was so surprised that he answered.

“I guess. I’m alive, my body works fine, I have enough money. I have work that I can do and that I imagine I’ll be able to do til I die or go senile. So yeah, I can’t complain.”

“But that’s just facts Jughead. Do those facts add up to being happy? Are you lonely or do you enjoy your own company? Do you want anything that you haven’t got, do you want to win a Nobel Prize or buy a mansion? Do you wish you had children?”

He shuddered at the thought. “No. I don’t want anything. I like not being responsible for anyone but myself. I can’t tell you if I’m happy. I don’t know what that is. Most people aren’t as fortunate as me so I don’t deserve anyone’s sympathy.”

“Oh Christ Jug. This is really making me sad now. You’re living this constrained, tiny, careful life. You’ve got all these gifts but you’re not letting yourself enjoy them. I just can’t let it ride. You should see someone. Let me give you some numbers.”

He wasn’t just going to let her decide he was ill. She had no right. “So you clearly think I’m crazy. Tell me what you think is wrong with me, Dr Freud.”

“Yeah, he’s really not my guy. If I tell you a few things, do you think you might consider therapy? I mean if I get it right? If I’m anything like as smart as I think I am?”

“Sure,”he said, wondering if she was about to tell him that he was a psychopath.

“Ok so put up your fingers like this.” She held up her hands, palms facing him and splaying her fingers. He snorted derisively but did as he was asked. I’m going to list ten indicators, fold down a finger for any that could be used to describe you; be honest. Emotional unavailability.” 

“What even is that?”

“That would be a person who can talk in detail about writers or how they spent their day but is totally unable to talk about whether or not they are happy.” Jughead scowled and folded down a finger. “Shunning intimacy.” He looked at her and shrugged in a gesture of incomprehension. “Someone who struggles to form lasting relationships, who lives in a degree of social isolation, whose ideal social engagement is a bag of chips and a biography of Hemingway.” Another finger. “Feeling that you are personally deeply flawed.” He looked at her defiantly and she continued, “That means a deep-seated feeling that something’s wrong with you. That you’re missing something that other people have. You’re not like other people, so you don’t quite fit in anywhere. That you shouldn’t be trusted to hold a baby for two minutes maybe.” He reluctantly folded down a finger. “Feeling empty or hollow.” He didn’t wait for an explanation, just folded a finger. ‘Disordered eating or addiction.” 

“No, I only drink beer and never more than two. No hard drugs.”

“How many cups of coffee today? How many cigarettes? How many of those sausage pastries last night? What would happen if you did drink liquor?” He folded down the next finger. “Difficulty trusting people or relying on them.” Another finger. “Poor self discipline.” He shook his head at that.

“Nope, not that one. I write seven hours a day. I make myself do it.”

“How?”

“Well I spent yesterday setting up the room, there are rules. I moved the bed out. I can’t get up from the desk, need the right kind of view, no internet, phone in another room.”

“What would happen if you had your phone on the desk?”

“I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from checking…Oh.” He folded down the finger.

“Anger issues?” He folded a finger, aware that only two remained. “Risk taking behaviours, maybe drugs, maybe sex, maybe extreme sports or something.” 

“Motorcycles,” he muttered folding down his ring finger. 

“Disordered sleep, nightmares, night terrors or similar.” He folded down the last pinkie finger.

“OK you got me Doc. What’s wrong with me?”

“I’m not a doc. Not yet anyway. I think that you’re an adult survivor of childhood neglect, maybe some abuse.” He was aware that he was blushing, his face becoming red as he realised that she had seen through him so easily, seen to the heart of all of his pretences to adequacy. She saw the weak child he had been, undersized and under nourished. She pitied him. “But, that’s the thing Jughead. You survived, you’re a success. You’re a writer, financially pretty sound by the look of it, doing well. But those experiences have an impact on folks. It can be unpacked, you can do even better if you start to address those issues. You could have a life where you aren’t scared of intimacy, where you can let other people in, you could share your life with someone.”

“Yeah but I’m fine alone. Really. I prefer it. There’s more time to write, I can do as I please. I’m free.”

“Well in that case surely when I asked if you were happy you should have beamed a kind of renunciant Zen smile and said yes. But you didn’t did you? And I guess we should be heading back now that I’ve probably ruined a perfectly nice evening.”

She hadn't ruined anything, she'd breached his defences. That was why it was so cruel that she had already been lying under the mossy turf of St Just churchyard when she'd done it. 


	3. Love, Faithful Love

_From the case files of Dr Abigail Burble  
4p.m. JHJ. Session #12  
J started the session by speaking about his pet dog’s adjustment to urban life. This led to an account of his acquisition of the dog. Revealing in terms of his initial reluctance to take responsibility for the animal. Dog is definitely an asset in terms of dealing with his bereavement (or whatever loss he has suffered). Session ended with a conversation about J’s inadequate parents. _

Jug was thankful for Hotdog, for his unconditional positive regard, for the ease with which he accessed joy, for his warm, comforting physical presence. He remembered the night he had come into his life. He and Betty had walked and drunk a beer and talked about neglect in Port Holland. Now he wondered if that had been a date, him all oblivious. It was getting dark as Betty drove them back to Portscatho but they both saw a car pull over ahead on the narrow lane. Betty slowed to a halt, the engine idling. The driver’s door opened and something white was thrown onto the road. The car pulled away and sped down the lane, much too fast. Betty put her car back into gear and advanced slowly but then the object in the road resolved itself into a heap of fluff and paws and began to howl. It was a puppy. Betty pulled over again and was out of the car before Jughead could say that the animal might be sick, that it might bite her. He had no idea if there was rabies in England and he guessed she didn’t know either. The animal was still howling as Betty picked it up but then it turned and licked her face. And she let it. In a moment she was climbing back into the car with it.

Jug began to reason with her. “Betty, it’s not your dog. Maybe the guy’s coming back for it. It’s probably got fleas or ticks or whatever. It might make you sick. It’ll probably be fine if we just leave it here.”

His words found nowhere to dock in the ocean of her compassion. “We are not leaving this innocent little fluff ball on a dark lane in the night. Forget that. Here, you hold him, I’m driving.”

“I can’t. I’ll hurt it. I can’t hold it. Oh for fuck’s sake.” The dog was on his lap now, trying to turn around and lick his face. He wasn’t going to let that happen but it meant that the creature’s wet tongue was all over his hands. He looked at it suspiciously. It was some sort of mix. The fur was long and shaggy but wavy. Its face was mostly white but, like a panda, there were black circles around its eyes. Its tongue was pink and enormously long, both floppy ears black. It was black over its back but white on the belly. Its paws were huge.

“I think it’s some kind of sheepdog mix. Maybe an Old English with something else. Poodle? Lhasa?” she was saying, taking a hand from the wheel to fondle its silly, floppy black ears. They looked soft. When she needed both her hands to steer and work the stick shift he touched the dog’s ears gently and the puppy simply fell onto its side on his lap to offer a belly for tickling. He didn’t realise he was smiling until he felt her eyes on him. He pulled back his hand like he’d been stung. “Oh my God Jughead. You’re prepared to risk your life swimming in water you don’t know, ride a motorcycle, smoke cigarettes but you’re scared to death of babies and puppy dogs. Come on, live a little, tickle that pupper’s belly.”

And he had and the danger he’d been scared of was manifested. He felt something for the stupid fucking dog. He’d been carrying around all that feeling, locked down, never letting it reach out tentacles to get tangled around anyone but he’d been guarding so carefully against her that the damn dog had slipped under his defences and now he cared about it. He tried to disentangle himself, handing the animal to her when they got back to the village and she’d parked the car, but she wouldn’t take it. “You keep him tonight,” she said. “We have the baby here. We’ll work something out tomorrow.” So he took the dog back to Valerian Cottage and scrambled eggs for its dinner and it wagged its tail and followed him about and he was done for.

He shut the dog out of his bedroom when he went to sleep, with a towel on the living room floor in the hope that accidents wouldn’t irreparably damage the rug or the couch. The howling became too much to bear at about 1.30 a.m. and when he woke next morning it was to a wet nose in his eye socket and a puddle in the corner of the bedroom floor which might explain why he’d been left on the road in the first place. Jug couldn’t be mad because the pup had such a hopeful expression in its eyes despite the fact that his life so far couldn’t possibly justify that expectation. There were tangles in its coat and its ribs stuck out too far. It reminded him of himself, of the scrawny kid he’d been. He got up, did his best to clean up the evidence of his little pal’s incontinence and headed to the store. He had to carry the dog since he had neither collar nor leash. On the way he saw the sweeping woman again and she paused in her work to pet the dog in his arms. He explained that it wasn’t his dog, that he was a stray that he was looking after until he could be taken to a shelter but she bustled into her home, returning with a large shopping bag which she handed to him. Inside was a dog bed, bowls, tennis balls and a retractable lead. “My old lady, Primrose, passed on earlier this year. I haven’t had the heart to get rid of her things but if this little one can use them then she’d be happy to give them to him. All you need is a collar and something tasty to put in the bowl.” Jughead thanked her and Primrose and promised that he’d bring the things back when he got the pup settled. “Well, I don’t think that’s going to be happening. You two seem like a happy match to me.”

“Well, in any case, thanks very much for all this. I’ll be seeing you. Have a nice day.”

At the store the dog was again a big hit. He bought dog food and the store owner showed him how to use the leash as a harness until he could get a collar. She gave him the phone number of the veterinarian who came to the village twice a week with a mobile surgery, dismissing Jughead’s assurances that he was unlikely to have the dog for that long. She also handed him a pile of newspapers that hadn’t been picked up. “Puppies are messy, you’ll need to save the carpets if you can. Here, you’ll need this too,” she said, adding carpet shampoo to the pile of supplies. Jug went home laden with his loot, the pup pulling on the leash, falling over his own feet and running in all directions to chase butterflies or interesting smells or seagulls twenty feet above him in the sky. Jug smiled at him in spite of his constant reminders to himself not to become too attached to the animal. Once back at the cottage he let the dog into the yard with a tennis ball and bowls of water and food and set to work. He did have to get up to check on the animal when the howling became disturbing but a belly scratch and a couple of throws of the tennis ball seemed to settle him again. He was, as Jug told him, a very good boy.

Betty came round at four, just before he was due to finish work. She insisted on sitting in the yard with the dog until his seven hours were up and he could hear her talking to the dog and laughing at its antics. He had an unusual sensation in the middle of his chest which, after some searching and interrogation, he realised was tenderness. He felt affection for both of them and it felt pretty damn good. He knew it would have to end, he was going back to the States, the dog was going to a shelter, but he thought that maybe affection was a sensation that was worth the risk. He decided to indulge it, just a little, just for today. 

Once he had shut the laptop he went outside to find Betty and the dog wrestling over a rope pull toy that had once belonged to the late Primrose. There was a good deal of growling, not only from the animal. “Hey, this is a great dog,” she said as he joined them in the yard.

“He’s ok, for a mutt,” Jug smiled, petting his ears.

“So, I made you a list of really good therapists in New York. I’m not going to nag you about it but I wanted you to have options. Just take the list will you?” Reluctantly he took the index card she was holding out to him and shoved it into the Hemingway biography he’d left on the table outside after his fourth morning coffee.

“So should we take the dog to the shelter now or tomorrow or what?” Jug asked, feeling dread over whatever answer she would give.

“Oh but he seems so happy here. And you’ve got all this stuff now. Why don’t you take care of him while you’re here? We could put ads up in the shop or in the local paper, see if we can find him a home. If not we can still take him to the shelter before you leave. And he can have a happy time with you for a few weeks rather than waiting in one of those awful wire cages. Look at his little face. Please?” She had her chin resting on the dog’s head, poking out her lower lip in a tragic appeal. He had no power to deny either of them so he laughed and agreed. "But he needs a collar.”

“And a name,” Betty said. You can’t just call him Dog.

“Dog is a perfectly acceptable name, straightforward,” Jug said decisively, ignoring Betty’s protests.

They set off on a road trip to the pet store in Truro to buy a collar, Betty reeling off possible names all the way. “Badger! Perfect, he’s black and white. Or zebra I guess. Or Panda? Chester? Like a chessboard. Bull’s Eye, like in Oliver. Pongo from 101 Dalmatians. No? What about Hemingway then? Or Fitz, like Fitzgerald.”

“Dog’s fine. He’s a dog. Fancy names are a curse. Believe me, I know.”

They bought the collar, Betty picking up treats and toys by the armful overruling Jug’s objections. At the cash desk the shop assistant looked at them fondly. “Practising with a puppy hey? Soon be a baby.”

Jug started to correct her, “Oh we’re not…” but Betty interrupted.

“Not in a great rush. We’ve only been married a year so the puppy is enough for now. We’ll enjoy trying though when the time comes, hey honey?” She smiled suggestively and slipped her arm around his waist. He swallowed hard at the implication and was embarrassed at how eagerly his body responded to her closeness. He coughed to cover his confusion and paid quickly, aware he was blushing. She giggled at him all the way back to the car. 

“You are too easy to tease Jones. The blush is adorkable. Isn’t it Charlie?” 

“Why Charlie?”

“Charlie Chaplin, black and white movies.” 

Since they were in the biggest town for miles they took advantage of the facilities and ate pizza at an outside table on a wharf looking over a river while the dog slept on Jughead’s feet. He’d had a good time and was relaxed so, when she asked him and the puppy to come to Lusow House the next evening so he could get to know her friends, he’d agreed. The next morning he woke to find his life had undergone a rapid and disconcerting volte face. There was a dog asleep on his feet, twitching and growling in a dream and he was going to a dinner party that night. “Who the fuck even are you dude?” he muttered. 

The dinner was a little awkward at first. Betty’s pal Archie seemed to want to take on the role of the protective father. He asked about Jug’s writing, whether it actually paid anything. Jug asked whether there was any money to be made in song writing and the redhead gestured around at his big ass house. The implication was clear. He had this huge place while Jug was renting a pokey cottage. Jug looked at him and said, “Your wife’s an attorney isn’t she? That must be a relief. You can always live on her earnings when times get tough, right?”

Betty laughed and put an arm around Jug’s shoulders. “Oh my god you two. Do you just want to get them out and measure? We can’t have you two circling each other all night.” Jug was shocked but it made him laugh. 

Veronica took Archie’s hand. “Do you want to wrestle? We don’t mind. We have oil. Shirts off. We’d like it, wouldn’t we Betty?”

Betty grinned. “Well it sounds like fun but I think Jug would rather play Scrabble to prove his dominance. Am I right Jug?”

“Hey, now you’re making me sound like some kind of nerd.”

“Oh darling you are a nerd. A hot nerd. Embrace it.” And he thought that, coming from her, it was a pretty great compliment. By the end of the night he felt like he’d understood Archie a little better. He was protective over Betty, like a brother. Jug liked that, could relate to it. Archie played him some tunes that he’d written and he didn’t mention that he was pretty sure that he had heard them all before.

_From the case files of Dr Abigail Burble_  
_4p.m. JHJ session #24_  
_JHJ seems to be making progress in addressing his relationships with his parents. I reassured him that he can choose whether or not he wishes to continue to have relationships with them. He seems to have found this idea liberating. He has also been able to discuss his intense relationship with EC. He refuses to accept that this relationship could not have happened as he described but can accept that it was impossible and that it is sensible to look for other explanations. He is, in short, rational about something irrational._

He was getting well. Gradually, incrementally, haltingly he made progress. He spoke to his dad, about to leave rehab and vulnerable as hell. He told him that he would pay for a sober companion if FP promised to try to stay clean for six months. His dad cried and told him he was sorry for being a shitty father. Jughead told him that he forgave him and that his sickness wasn’t his fault but that it would be his fault if he wasted this chance. If he did that then they would be done for good. He felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders when he hung up the call. He told Jellybean what he’d said and she cried and thanked him and he found that he wanted to see her. They made plans to spend Christmas together. Then a week later the publisher forwarded another of the letters with the Ohio postmark. He took it with him to therapy, scared that Abby would tell him he had to read it and maybe go and meet the woman who had sent it. He didn’t want to do that. She surprised him. “Would you be happier with her in your life Jughead?” 

He shook his head. “No. She didn’t treat me well even when she was around. I think she probably just wants something. She thinks she can use me.”

“If she were sick or in jail would you want to help her?”

“No. I guess that makes me a terrible person. But no. I don’t even hate her. I just don’t care about her.”

“If you don’t want to correspond with her how can you make that clear without personal contact?”

“I guess I could get the publisher’s lawyers to tell her to stop writing. Tell her that I won’t see the letters or even know they have been sent.”

“How would you feel about that?”

“Relieved.” She smiled and he did exactly that. No more letters came. 

There was an alcohol free but surprisingly fun family Christmas with his sister, her boyfriend, their dad and his sober companion, he planned a camping trip with Sweetpea and Fangs for the spring, he finished the first draft of the book. He only missed Betty a hundred times a day. Hotdog would fall over his feet and he’d want to tell her, the editor’s notes on the draft arrived and he wanted to show her, there was blossom in Brooklyn Botanical Gardens and he longed to take her there. He supposed it would always be like that.

Somehow learning to live with the loss of her had him recalling the joy of falling in love with her. He was able to think about the happiness now without the crushing pain of the loss making him curl up on his bed and sob while Hotdog pushed at him with his nose and whined until he stroked him and told him he was ok.

He recalled their summer. After the dinner party they spent almost every evening together. Some people would have assumed they were dating but he was cautious. There were no kisses, no making out on the couch, no lingering glances or hand holding. It wasn’t that he didn’t want those things but, every time it occurred to him to lean in to her lips, he reminded himself that it was futile. For one thing he would be back in New York in a few short weeks while she was in England until at least October. Then she might take up a job anywhere in the world. She had prepared applications for faculty jobs in Cambridge, Gothenburg, Johannesburg and, perhaps most disturbing to Jug’s equilibrium, NYU. She was waiting to send them until she had defended her PhD. Then she might go anywhere. Another reason to prevaricate was that he really fucking liked her. He wasn’t a total idiot. He saw the way she looked at him and knew it was a mutual attraction but he’d let her down. He was unequal to the task of making a woman like her happy so it was better to relish her friendship and then go home and enjoy the delicious agony of nostalgia. 

He had enough on his hands with the dog situation anyway. He kept intending to place ads but somehow everyday he had failed to do it. Betty nagged him about the animal’s name and then on one of their walks up to the day-mark, the dog panting and complaining behind them, he had rechristened him Hotdog and that had stuck. Once the animal had a name, somehow he felt like he was responsible for him, like Adam naming every beast of the field and then having stewardship over them. He began to idly, and then increasingly seriously, research how to get Hotdog home with him. There was no quarantine but he needed certificates from vets and it would cost thousands of dollars. And Hotdog would be big, he couldn’t live in a tiny third floor walk up in the East Village. He would have to uproot his whole life. It was ridiculous, unconscionable. He was totally going to do it. 

At least his work was progressing well; he’d found his narrative at last. It was a subtler, more meditative book than he’d written in the past. He wondered if he was finding his mature style. The main character was a widower, mourning and gradually recovering from the death of a beloved wife. She appeared in the book as a psychological manifestation of his grief, urging him not to give in to his misery, forcing him to notice the joy of the icy sea on his skin, the texture of the sand against his feet, the blood rushing in his ears as he strode up a hill towards a viewpoint. He thought it was promising.

One evening they were sitting together at the patio table, Hotdog curled on the floor just inside the kitchen door. Jug found that Betty had a way of making him talk about himself as he never had before. The conversation turned to travelling, the places she’d like to go. He mentioned South East Asia and then, somehow, he was telling her about Trula, about how he hadn’t been able to talk to her about what he needed or wanted and yet he’d resented her for not knowing. He realised as he spoke that he had been frightened, scared that if she saw who he was, that she would reject him. So he kept himself hidden from her, shut her out. And yet all he’d needed was that she should give him some peace and quiet between six a.m. and one in the afternoon so he could get his day’s work done before the heat became impossible to bear and he had to get into the ocean to cool off. She didn’t let him go down on her, assumed that he wouldn’t want to, and he couldn’t tell her that he did, that it excited him, that he liked the power it gave him. But he said nothing and the regard he had for her slowly cooled and they became roommates and then even less than that, courteous colleagues or neighbours who said hello in the hallway but never drank coffee together or went for a beer.

“I didn’t do well with her Betts. I should have talked to her from the start but I didn’t. I’m such a coward that I’d rather lose the relationship than just be honest.”

“I totally understand Jug. It’s really hard to be open about that stuff. I was the same with Adam. I should have said ‘I think you want to move faster than I’m ready for. I’d like to slow down,’ but I didn’t. I manipulated him until he broke up with me and it was much sadder and more painful than it needed to be. Sometimes I worry that I know the theory about people’s feeling, about relationships, but I’m flunking out of the practical. And I don’t think I had anything like your trauma.” She must have seen him flinch at that, she’d struck that raw nerve. “Hey, don’t worry. You don’t need to tell me if you don’t want to. I’m here, but it’s your story Jug.”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like it’s the only thing that’s really me. I imagine that if I share it with anyone that I’ll be blank, wiped clean, maybe not able to write anymore. I don’t know why I feel that.”

“I’m not pushing. But I am your friend. You know the dragon in The Hobbit? What’s it called?”

“Smaug,” Jug said.

“I so knew you were a Hobbit guy,” she grinned. “Anyway, the dragon curls up with the treasure hoard and guards it so jealously that it has nothing else. There’s no chance for it to, Christ I don’t know, take up bowling or learn basket weaving or whatever, it’s just all about the treasure. I wonder if you’re like that with your pain. You’re guarding it so carefully that there’s just no room for anything else. And it’s pain Jug, maybe there could be a way to let it go, to let the wound heal rather than being so centred on it.”

He looked at her and took a deep breath. “Look, it’s nothing. People have survived much worse. It’s self indulgent. There are kids in wars, in refugee camps, kids with incurable diseases, kids in fucking cages at the Mexican border.”

“Christ, really?” He was surprised she didn’t know that but he guessed she’d been out of the States for a while. Lucky girl to be out of that shocking loop. “But still feeling sympathy for them, wanting to help them, doesn’t make your pain any less valid. You can tell me if you want to. You seem to want to. I’m not going to judge you.”

“I’m not sure. Oh fuck it. Look, I’ll Hemingway it, OK? “ She nodded. “My dad’s an alcoholic. A recovering, relapsing alcoholic. He’s sober and he has a shave, maybe gets a job, then he falls off the wagon and he’s drunk in a ditch or he’s in jail or he’s married a stripper in Vegas and needs an annulment. And then sober again. And it’s always going to be different this time. And it never is. My mom left us when I was eleven. She took my baby sister and left me behind. She didn’t say anything. I came home. They were gone. My mother left me with my alcoholic father and didn’t leave a note to explain why I was so fucking expendable.” He paused and breathed deeply for a moment. “My dad was in a gang. Mostly petty crime, some drug stuff. There were always these guys in our trailer, dealing, fighting, drinking, making out with women I didn’t know. They were always trying to get me to deliver a package to somewhere or they’d try to get me to take a drink, see FP’s kid get wasted, funny as fuck. The women would kiss me sometimes, ask me how it made me feel. I didn’t want to feel anything but sometimes I did. It was … bad so I took off. I slept rough for a while, outdoors, then in a shack at the drive in, in a janitor’s cupboard at my high school. I didn’t want anyone to know. I tried to make grades but it was tough. I was dirty. Hungry. So cold. Upstate fucking New York. The other kids laughed at me, at my clothes, at the way I smelled. The jocks liked to punch me, shove me on the stairs. Then my dad got arrested so I moved back to the trailer but the gang wasn’t going to let me be. I could either be in it or be an outsider and that was more dangerous so I joined. There was an initiation, there were things I had to do, I made the deliveries, I hurt people. I found I could take a hit pretty well, I could endure a lot of pain, because I didn’t really feel the fear. I could give a lot of pain because I didn’t feel any compassion”. He shuddered. “Anyway all through it I was writing. A teacher read my stuff, contacted a friend at the University of Iowa. I barely graduated high school but I got a full ride on the basis of my writing. It saved my life. Writing saved my life. So that’s me.”

Tears were rolling down her cheeks, fat tears that she was making no effort to hide, so he reached out with his thumb and stroked one away as it slid over her beautiful skin. He couldn’t bear the way she was looking at him, she was seeing him so completely, with no defence. He had to make that stop so he leaned forward and kissed her. He’d learned that sex didn’t have to mean intimacy, he could use it to stop the conversation dead, he could make someone so wrapped up in pleasure that he simply disappeared. He began to run his fingers over her throat, kissing the underside of her jaw, breathing behind her ear until she shivered. “Do you want to go upstairs?” he whispered and she nodded wordlessly. He took her hand and led her up the staircase. Once they were in the bedroom he began to undress her but suddenly she shook herself as if she had walked through a cobweb and was shaking herself free of the silk. 

“Hey Juggie. Is it ok if I try something? Will you trust me for a minute? It’s nothing weird.” It seemed ungallant not to accede to the lady’s wishes so he nodded. She started to take off her clothes as he watched her. It was somehow more exciting to see her, willingly, decisively make herself naked before him. Her agency in exposing her vulnerability was so brave. 

“Do you want me to…?” He asked, gesturing this own clothes. 

“Only do what you really want to do Jug. If you want to take something off then do but if you’d prefer not then that’s fine too.” He didn’t want to miss a minute of her undressing so he sat back on the bed and watched her until she stood in front of him completely naked. She was so beautiful, her limbs the gold of the ripe barley, her eyes so calm and trusting. She knelt on the bed and kissed his cheek. “I know you and I care about you Jughead Jones.” she said softly. The quietness and honesty of the statement surprised him.

“I care about you too,” he said reflexively, wondering what was happening, feeling a little uneasy. He reached out to touch her but she moved a little out of his reach. Then coming close again she stroked his jaw. 

“You’re so special to me. I trust you. I care about you so much,” she whispered and kissed him again. He felt uncomfortable. He didn’t understand. She still looked at him like she saw him. He didn’t want to be seen, he’d been trying to deflect that. Now she was naked but it was him that was vulnerable. She was strong enough to be exposed and completely open about her feelings. Nothing was hidden, body and soul. He started to protest but she kissed his lips softly. As she pulled away she said, “You deserve to be happy. I only want that. I want to show you how deeply I feel for you, because of who you are.”

“No, I’m not anything Betts. You’re making a mistake.” He tried to kiss her, to seize the initiative, to take control so she would stop looking at him, stop seeing him.

She came back to him and held his head gently against her breast, stroking his hair softly. “You’re a good man. I know you. You’re valuable. You’re worth my caring for you. You deserve to be cared for. You deserve to be seen, to be loved.”

Everything was confusing to him. He wanted this woman, wanted to turn his face, press his lips against her breast, put his hands on her, make her come, make her scream. He wanted her not to look at him anymore, to stop her slow, painstaking dismantling of the defensive walls he had built so carefully, with such pain, over many long years. Yet, at the same time and with a desperation that he could hardly bear, he also wanted her to always see him, always care for him, be on his side forever. He pushed himself back from her. “You have to stop saying that. I can’t be whatever the hell you need me to be. This isn’t going to work. I’m sorry. I made a mistake. You should go.”

“You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to hide or pretend. You are exactly what you should be. I don’t expect anything from you. You have no responsibility to be anything but yourself. Whether we make love or not, I care about you. I’m not going to stop caring. Even if you send me away, even if you say I can’t touch you like I want to, I still care about you. I’ll give myself to you if you want me but if you don’t I’ll care about you anyway. It isn’t a mistake. You’re worth caring for. You’re enough.” She put her hands on either side his face and looked into his eyes. He could see the acceptance in hers. That was when he started to weep. He was frightened by his need to believe what she said and by the terrible conviction that she was wrong, the need to trust her and the horror of the void that would open up in him if he did that and she laughed at him or walked away. He’d been alright before; he’d been surviving. Now, without meaning to, he’d given her this terrible power over him and he didn’t know if he could take it back. The sobbing was shaking him and she put her arms around him and held him, his arms around her chilled, smooth skin. Suddenly he very much wanted her skin to be against his so he ripped off his clothes and then took her in his arms again, still crying against her breasts as she held him, shaking and gasping. In some part of his mind he knew that his weakness was humiliating but he simply couldn’t get control. An hour later he was exhausted and she was still holding him. He looked up at her face, expecting to see pity or disgust in her eyes. What he saw took his breath away. It was complete understanding. It felt like love. He reached up and kissed her with the passion that he had been repressing, crushing, killing, for years and she kissed him back. 

“What have you done to me? I don’t know what to do with all this feeling,” he murmured as he kissed her neck, running his hands over her breasts. 

“I just felt like you needed someone to be honest with you. To show you that feeling for someone can be good, can be strong. Oh and it makes sex kind of amazing.” It really did. When he kissed her breasts she cried out in pleasure and the cry made him instantly so hard that he didn’t know if he was going to be able to last. He didn’t care, there was no way he was rushing this experience. He massaged her breasts as he kissed and sucked and she mewled and panted. Then she had her hand on him, stroking him and he saw stars behind his eyelids. He lay on his back and pulled her on top of him, stroking her between her legs with one hand, holding a breast at his lips with the other. She knelt across him, rubbing herself against his thigh and gasping, stroking him with her hand and arching her back to give him better access to her breasts. She was magnificent and strong and completely open to him. He rubbed his thumb against her and she quivered to a climax and he threw her onto her back and put his mouth on her before it was over. If he could have stayed there forever he would be perfectly content. He thought he would like to die like that, his mouth on her, his fingers exploring her everywhere, her moans and cries drifting out of the open window, mingling with the sound of the seagulls. Soon she was pulling at his shoulders, “Be inside me, I need you to come inside me, please Jug. I’m so ready.” He grabbed his emergency condom from his wallet and she grabbed it and put it onto him in an expert way that made him want her even more and then he was sinking into her, like that was where he had always been supposed to be, like coming home, like softness and comfort and warmth and acceptance. Then she thrust up at him and there were more stars behind his eyes. He tried to be measured and slow, trying so hard to find what she liked when every part of him was screaming at him “Faster, deeper, more, more, more.” He muttered against her, and she put her hand to his forehead and looked deeply into his eyes. 

“What? You can say it. You can say anything. This is honesty Jug, that’s what this is about. No hiding.”

“I said that it’s never been like this before. I’ve never felt this much before. Oh fuck it’s so good.”

“So good.” She lifted her knees and suddenly he was able to go deeper and he began to moan, deep in his chest and his eyes were blazing into hers and he could see her climax there, see her reaching out to it, see her being swept away by it and then he was juddering and thrusting through it and yelling out and he knew that he had to keep this woman, make her happy forever. She was the answer, she was what he had come here to find.

She slept in his bed. Now, instead of opening his eyes to an empty house in a strange land, looking out into a cold ocean, he woke to a beautiful woman beside him, a loyal hound on his feet. He guessed it was part of his craziness that even in this perfect happiness he started waiting for the axe to fall.


	4. My Most Grievous Loss

_From the case files of Dr Abigail Burble_  
_4p.m. JHJ session #30_  
_JHJ was finally able to tell me about his last meeting with EC. I am still uncertain how to understand what has happened to him but find him to be completely lucid. He assures me that he has suffered no further hallucinations. He speaks of his experience in ways characteristic of a person who has suffered a bereavement. I have decided to proceed with grief therapy rather than treating for psychosis._

In the days after they made love that first time he found himself, like Wordsworth, surprised by joy. It had crept up on him. He had imagined that his heart was a shack, derelict and inhospitable and yet, every day, he found new rooms, new wings, new mansions and palaces and she was empress over all of them. He hadn’t told her; he was guarding this new secret until he could form some kind of plan. He knew that this opening up was making him vulnerable. He knew that he was giving her the power to hurt him terribly, perhaps irreparably. He thought it might be the most dangerous thing he had ever done but he found he was able to trust her. He would simply throw his lot in with her, offer to go anywhere if she would just take him and his dog with her. 

They swam in the early mornings and then he wrote. The work was good, he thought, different from his other books but worthwhile. They spent evenings with Archie and Veronica, they babysat while the young parents went out for dinner, they spent nights alone at the cottage. They made love on deserted beaches, amongst sand dunes and marram grass, in the cottage and in her regency style bedroom at the big house. Every day she seemed, to him, like a fresh miracle. One afternoon the five of them sat on the lawn of the cream house, the baby crawling between them giggling. Jughead grabbed his phone and snapped a picture of the three friends, and the little girl pulling herself to her feet by grabbing handfuls of Hotdog’s fur as he stood patiently. He sent it to Betty and later saw that she had put it up on her instagram, tagging him as the photographer since he refused to be in the picture. The month blazed and burned like a flaring match until he could no longer ignore that his fingers were burning and he was due on a plane within days. On the 29th there was to be another party at Lusow House. He would declare himself, ask to stay with her, move his things across in the morning, be with her. He would give his life to her. He, like Gatsby, would believe in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. He would run faster, stretch out his arms farther...

He looked out of the window as he was changing for the party. He saw her sitting alone on the stone bench, waiting for him, a still point in the garden as the other guests circulated and networked. Hotdog watched him leave with a reproachful glare. Within minutes he was beside her. “Can I talk to you?” he began. Now the moment was here he was scared. She smiled at him and nodded but seemed apprehensive. “Here’s the thing. I’m in love with you, like crazy in love with you. I have a plane ticket for two days time but I want to cash it in and stay with you. I’d like to always stay with you, for as long as you’ll let me. Is that what you want?” He was vaguely aware of guests in their fine clothes drifting past them, glancing over at the couple engaged in the intense conversation, perhaps wondering what they were discussing.

She smiled but there was sadness in her eyes and panic began to rise as it had when his mother had told him again and again that she wished he’d never been born or when he heard slurring voices from inside the trailer as he approached the door after school. He wished he was writing this story not living it. “I love you too Jug. So much. I wondered if you were going to say something like that. I wanted you to, but I’m so worried that I’ve jinxed us. I think I haven’t been fair to you. I want this, I want us but I think we need to take a step back. You’ve become so important to me that I’ve been trying to be everything to you, therapist, lover, confidante. That’s not good for you. Hell it’s not safe for you.” He tried to stop his heart from pounding out of his chest as he braced himself for the rejection, remembering that day when his mother simply left him. He was just a child; he hadn’t understood that he should have guarded his heart from her. He had known better this time and yet he made the same mistake again. A beautiful girl smiled at him and he just opened the doors and let in to her steal everything from him and burn down the house. He could smell jasmine and honeysuckle on the air. The night was warm and she was wearing a blue dress. He would commit these things to memory, the last night he had hope, the last night he was loved. Soon it’d be over and he’d be alone. Tomorrow he’d wake up and make coffee, sleepily forgetting that she wasn’t there, so there would be too much. He’d drink it so it didn’t go to waste and try to remember to make less, have less, want less, live smaller from now on. 

She was looking at him, her fingers resting on his arm. “Do you know about transference?” He didn’t know if he could bear it. She was going to give him some sort of academic reason why she didn’t want him. She was going to make it about ideas and theories while she tore him into tiny, bloody shreds. But he was an intellectual too, if he could engage with her argument maybe he could overcome it, reason her love back.

He answered. “It’s when a patient falls in love with their therapist. But you aren’t my therapist Betty. You’re my lover, my best friend.” He kept his voice low. It was a party after all, even though he wanted to yell and make a scene.

“But I’ve been acting like your therapist, pulling out your feelings about your past, trying to get you to reframe them and understand them. I got you to go back into those childhood feelings, the rejection, the insecurity and at the same time I’ve been offering you love and acceptance. Of course you’re going to feel something for me. But we can’t build a relationship on that, on the foundation of your trauma. You survived complex abuse. You needed real therapy but I wanted you so much. I wanted to help you but also I wanted you to be well enough return my feelings. I should have insisted you see a therapist first but I was arrogant and impatient. Now I’m in love with you but would be so wrong of me to ignore what’s going on here. See a doctor. If you still want me in a year, two years, come and find me. I’ll wait for you, for as long as it takes.” There were tears in her eyes but her jaw was set; she was determined.

He felt himself recoiling from her. Something inside his head whispered “She thinks you’re crazy. She’s trying to get away from you. She’s sending you to therapy to give her time to escape, to shake you off.”

“You don’t want me. You want to be free of me. You don’t have to make up justifications. I wouldn’t want me either.” He said it blankly, the feelings he’d allowed to grow and to ripen, withering on the branch, the passion turning to bile, to gall, to poison.

“Jug, try to listen. I do want you. I love you. But you need to choose from a healthy place. You haven’t done anything wrong. This is my fault. I love you too much to let you make choices based on my mistake. Please, try to understand.”

“I understand. I’m damaged and you’re done with me. You wanted a summer love affair with a sell by date and I took it too far. I get it. Bye Betty. I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. I’ll go.” 

He strode off across the lawn to the gate, pushing past groups of guests as they chatted, heard her crying after him, “Please Jug, please don’t say that.” Archie was there putting a restraining hand on his shoulder, asking “You ok pal?” He shrugged off his hand and pushed him away, rushing to the gate and letting himself out, locking it and then throwing his key as far as he could, hearing it clatter off rocks, down to the sea as party guests stared after him. Now that was a scene. They’d all have a fine story to tell. He went back to the cottage and sat in the dark living room, staring at the cold sea and stroking Hotdog’s ears, the dog resting his chin on his knee, somehow understanding that things were suddenly bad for them, that there would be no games tonight. 

He opened his eyes to find himself still on the couch. Hotdog wasn’t with him. He wandered through the cottage looking for his companion. When he walked into his bedroom there was an uncanny, sickening orange glow in the room. He looked out of the window. Lusow House was ablaze.

For an instant, as he stared out of the window at the flames, he wondered if he had done that, if his anger had somehow manifested as flame. Then he gasped in a breath and plummeted downstairs, out of the front door. He ran to the iron gate, remembering only at the last minute that he had no key. He grabbed the gate; it was hot. The lawn was illuminated in the terrible, flickering ocherous light. Heat on his face, ash in the air, panic stealing his breath. No one was outside on the lawn. Flames erupted from the roof, dreadful serpent tongues darting out from the broken windows. It was only then that he realised that there was no sound. The house was burning in perfect silence, no cracking, no crashing of beams, not even the sound of sirens. Then, at the edge of his consciousness, whining and growling. Hotdog. Something wet against his cheek. He opened his eyes to find himself on the couch in Valerian Cottage, the dog licking his face and whimpering, obviously trying to waken him from a nightmare that had had him screaming and, judging by the wetness on his face and chest, crying bitterly. 

He hugged the dog to himself, kissing his warm soft head and murmuring reassurance, as much to himself as to the quivering animal. He was losing his mind. He carried the pup upstairs and collapsed onto the bed. There was no orange glow through the window. Slowly his pulse steadied and, with Hotdog’s regular breathing as a metronome, he fell asleep. 

The next morning the dream clung to his consciousness like seaweed clung to the ropes at the harbour, trailing his every thought. He stared at the ceiling for a long moment, trying to make the necessary adjustments to his expectations. He wasn’t moving in with Betty. She didn’t want him. He was going home, alone. Hotdog was going to a shelter, to a concrete pen and a clanging metal door. “Fuck that. You’re coming with me pal. We’ll get you a flight.” Somehow the necessity of caring for the dog made it possible for him to get up despite the aching disappointment. He dragged himself out of bed and, by habit, looked out at the cream house. It was gone.

He wasn’t sure what happened then. Somehow he found himself, mostly dressed, his hands clutching the iron gate as he had in his dream, Hotdog standing at his feet, both of them staring through the elaborate iron scrollwork. He pushed against the gate and it swung open with a creak. Instead of a manicured lawn there were thistles and tares. The stone bench stood almost obscured by the long grasses, the plane tree a blackened stump. There was an outline of the portico on the ground but barely one stone was left on another. One wall remained, near the edge of the promontory, mostly blackened but, near the top, he saw a scrap of the wallpaper from her bedroom, the wallpaper that he had stared at just a couple of days before, focussing on it so that he didn’t come before he’d felt her juddering to her orgasm around him. There had been a fire but it hadn’t happened last night, this ground had been untenanted for months, years perhaps. Had he slept through long seasons, had he slept through losing her? 

He knew that he was clinging onto his sanity by the tips of his fingers as he returned to the cottage and opened the laptop. He typed in the name of the local paper. He was familiar with it from the pages that covered the kitchen floor, site of Hotdog’s most frequent “accidents.” Into the search bar he typed “house fire portscatho.” There were three results, the top one showed a picture of the house. “Tragic Loss In Portscatho. Fire crews from across Cornwall tackled a blaze at a house in the village of Portscatho in the early hours of the morning but were unable to save any of the occupants. Lusow House, a listed building, was being rented by a party of American visitors. All were declared dead at the scene.” There was another image. The caption read, “Archie and Veronica Andrews and their infant daughter Winifred with their companion Elizabeth Cooper and her dog Charlie. All perished in the blaze. (Picture J. Jones.)”. It was the picture he’d taken a few days before, that she had posted on social media, that she had tagged him into with the photography credit. The article was dated two years ago, to the day.

He told the doctor his story, stroking Hotdog as he did so, finding comfort in the animal when he had to tell her the difficult parts. When he got to the end he scrutinised Dr Burble’s face to see if she was scared of him or if she disbelieved him. Instead she looked curious. “I don’t understand how this could have happened Jughead but in many ways it doesn’t matter. We’ve been doing what Betty wanted because she was either a very smart girl who came back from the beyond to help you or she’s a manifestation of a part of your mind that knows what you need but also knows that you won’t act on it on your own. You had to deal with the loss and neglect and abuse that you’ve endured and that’s true whether you spent last summer falling in love with a ghost or whether you had a very complex and long lasting hallucination.” Jug didn’t argue that hallucinations couldn’t give out therapists’ phone numbers and that Hotdog must also be an hallucination since he had been killed in a fire before he was born. He couldn’t think about those wrinkles in the narrative, he would never be sane again.

Somehow he had managed to claw back a life. He dreamed of her. Usually she was saying “If you still want me in a year, two years, come and find me. I’ll wait for you, for as long as it takes.” Those were among the last words she had ever said to him and he held them to himself like an amulet. At the time he’d been hurt and thought she was trying to soften the blow of his dismissal but now he wondered if she had meant it, that she would have waited for him to be well. He tried to think that was true because it meant that he could be enough. It meant that in his life another human being had found, in him, something worthy of love. Other times he dreamed of her lips on him, her looking up through tangled waves of sun bleached hair to murmur to him “I never liked to do this with anyone else but I am so into it with you. I just want to consume you, take you into myself entirely, keep you forever. I think you make me a little crazy.” He’d wake gasping and sticky and feel the need to apologise to Hotdog who looked at him like he was the animal. There was a day at the end of April when, just for a moment, his brain duped him into thinking that he had glimpsed her as he arrived for his therapy appointment. He whirled around but she wasn’t there. A cruel trick of the mind.

_From the case files of Dr Abigail Burble_  
_4p.m. JHJ session #39_  
_A strange development in JHJ’s case. I seem to have received proof that JHJ and EC were together the summer before she passed away. However JHJ tells me he was in Thailand that summer. I am unable to explain this. Would I be irresponsible to reinforce JHJ’s delusion? I need to discuss this in my own personal therapy._

When he arrived for his appointment on a Thursday in the middle of June he thought Abby looked worried. “You OK?” he asked as he sat in his usual place.

“I don’t know. I’ve been agonising about whether to show you this. Look, it came in the post.” She pushed a book across the desk to him. It was an academic volume. “Reciprocity in Functional Theory: A Reanalysis” by Elizabeth A. Cooper, Adam G. Chisholm and Lydia Wyndham. “It’s a review copy. Just published. Look inside.”

There was a dedication page. It read “Our dear friend and colleague Dr Elizabeth (Betty) Cooper did not live to see the publication of this work. Her life was cut tragically short. Her insights were invaluable in the reanalysis of the norm of reciprocity; it was always her project. She was unable to finish the book and so we, her friends and colleagues, have prepared it for publication. Because the work is, in the main, hers we dedicate it as she instructed her thesis to be dedicated, in her own words.

“This work is dedicated with love and respect to my more than best friend Forsythe (Jughead) Jones. Apart or together, he will always be my inspiration.  
Betty Cooper”

As he stared at the dedication he realised Abby was speaking. “I guess I’m just having trouble making the time line work. To be honest I assumed that you had met Betty at some point, before she went to Cambridge. Then you’d forgotten all about it and, when your subconscious started trying to get you to deal with the issues that you’d been repressing, you created this dream woman to spur you towards recovery. I was pretty happy with that account. Then this. I rang Adam. I’ve met him a couple of times. I asked him about the dedication. The last I knew he and Betty were…”

“Yeah, it’s ok. She told me about him.”

“So he said that they had broken up the December before she died. He’d called her about the work when she was in Cornwall, asked her how she was doing, said he missed her. He was wondering if they should try again. She told him that she’d met someone, that he was a writer, that it was serious. But weren’t you abroad in August three years ago?”

“I was in Asia from February until October that year. In August I was in Koh Samui . Hang on.” He reached for his phone and within seconds he had pulled up the instagram account of a girl called Trula who seemed to own no clothes other than bikinis. He scrolled rapidly backwards through her timeline, “Here.” He passed her the phone. There was a slew of photos of the girl on tropical beaches and reclining in a hammock, in the background of many of them was a dark, angular figure hunched over a laptop, unmistakably himself, the dates matched his account. “Didn’t leave until I came back here just after my birthday. I’d never been to Cornwall before last summer.”

“Well it makes no sense. I don’t know how to process it.”

“At last. Welcome to my world.”

She gave him the book and throughout the next few days he kept opening it to trace his fingers over the dedication. She had been real. She had loved him. “If you still want me in a year, two years, come and find me. I’ll wait for you, for as long as it takes,” she’d said. He wondered, since apparently miracles could happen, if that might be true. 

He began to think about the white cottage with the view over the sea. Mark was booking a tour for the new book with dates starting in the fall but the summer stretched ahead of him, empty of commitments. He looked online and Valerian Cottage was available for three weeks from mid August. There was a note on the website that said that there was construction work in progress near the cottage and that had clearly put off potential visitors. He wondered about Hotdog, contemplated asking Jellybean to take care of him for a few weeks but he realised that much as his dad still needed a sober companion, he needed the reassurance of this silly canine. That meant rabies shots and a three week waiting period before they could travel. He called Hotdog’s veterinarian and made the appointment. There was a little difficulty booking the cottage; apparently he had been a less than exemplary tenant the year before what with the cigarettes and the stained carpets but an eye watering hike in rent and a large deposit made the problem disappear.

He hired a car this time, remembering the exhausting train journey with a shudder. He spent a sleepless night in an anonymous airport hotel and drove down to Cornwall the next morning. He was trying to picture the burned ruins of Lusow house so that he wouldn’t be shocked by the sight but despite himself he kept imagining that the house would be intact and Betty would be there, on the lawn, in that modest blue bathing suit, reading a book or playing with the baby. 

She wasn’t. Instead of the burned dereliction that he had left behind last year the site had been bulldozed and concrete foundations poured. Workers in fluorescent jackets swarmed over the spit of land like busy termites, loud voices and sharp barks of laughter seeming to defile a sacred place. He almost got back into the car to drive away but Hotdog looked at the cottage and pawed at the car window, recognising the home of his puppyhood. That first night he stood at the bedroom window, looking out at the promontory. There were security lights blazing over the earth moving machinery. He wondered what would be built there, who would move into the new house, where his dreams had died. He wondered if they would be haunted by Betty as he was. It was an effort to tear himself away from the window, to drag himself back to the bleak shore of the present when he was caught in a rip tide that swept him relentlessly back into the past.

For two weeks Jug and Hotdog revisited the places that they had seen first with Betty, processing grief, saying goodbye. In the evenings, if they passed the place where the iron gate had once stood, Hotdog would whine and pull on the leash. “I know pal. I’m sorry she’s not here. It hurts me too.” He found that somehow he could only write poetry so he took a notebook out onto the shingle. Words and phrases were arrayed before his mind and he picked over them, selecting and rejecting them, building the thoughts into towers as she had once built her cairns on these beaches. 

_She should see this_  
_That thought a thousand times_  
_Raindrops cling to petals_  
_Railroad tracks, lava lines_  
_In the low sunlight,_  
_Whitecaps flurried, wind tears my eyes_

_She should hear this,_  
_In the wakening moments._  
_A gull’s sticky footfalls on the roof_  
_The dog gnarrs in a dream_  


_And then the fall from forgetting_  
_The still smooth pillow touching mine_  
_The unused coffee cup_  
_That tasted her lips_  
_And doesn’t forget_  


Eventually he worked up the moral courage for a trip he had been putting off since he arrived. He had found out that Betty had been buried in a village cemetery about fifteen minutes from Portscatho. Archie, Veronica and the baby had been repatriated for interment so Betty was alone in a foreign field. He chose a bouquet of daisies and sunflowers and made the drive on the 29th, the day he’d lost her forever. It was a beautiful place, next to an estuary. He sat in the churchyard for a long time, Hotdog laying across the grave. There was a small slate marker just bearing her name and her dates. He’d brought a volume of Anne Sexton’s poetry as an offering and he read her “A Curse Against Elegies” and “Love Letter Written In A Burning Building” out loud, as a kind of prayer. Then he cried, Hotdog pushing his nose into his palm and whimpering until he stroked his ears. Eventually there were no more tears and Jug felt that he had survived a decisive battle. He’d loved her; he’d lost her. He grieved but it didn’t kill him. He could love and lose and survive and that was the gift that she had given him. He knew now that it was worth the risk; the joy and the pain were part of the same picture, a picture of a living human being. If he closed down one then he would never have the other and that didn’t make for a life worth the candle. The ocean and the flame could both kill you but a life without those two terrifying, renewing, exhilarating partners was a cold, dried up mockery of existence. He got back into the car and drove to the cottage and lay down on the bed and slept, exhausted.

The music woke him. It was one of Archie’s songs. He had found out that he did recognise them. They had become pretty big mainstream hits after the news of his death had broken, in the same way that everyone had been best buds with the kid that killed himself in high school even though they’d never even noticed he existed until he didn’t. Now someone was playing one of them, on the spit of land where he’d died, on the anniversary of his death, more mawkish than memorialising. Jug went over to the window to see where the sound was coming from. Lusow House stood there, outside his window, lit for a party, intact. 

He stood dumbly for a moment, unable to process what he was seeing, breathing in without the capacity to exhale. Some part of his brain was telling him that if he moved or breathed or looked away, that it would be gone. Then, decisively, he grabbed a book from his nightstand, and ran, Hotdog at his heels. The iron gate would be locked and like a dumbass he’d thrown away his key so he ran around to the other side of the house and up the long drive, the dog bounding and barking beside him. He made it to the door. “Sit Hotdog, stay boy,” he commanded. Hotdog looked at him, outraged, but sat obediently nonetheless. There was a crowd inside, people chatting on the stairs and standing in knots in each room, juggling champagne glasses and tiny plates. He shoved past them, barely registering their looks and head shakes both at his manners and his ratty t shirt, jeans and bare feet. Archie was in the living room and Jug couldn’t stop himself from throwing his arms around him, to reassure himself of his solid reality. “What the hell man? Betty’s in tears. What the fuck happened?” Archie asked, holding Jug at arm’s length.

“How long ago did I leave?” Jug asked, trying to understand where he was in the timeline of Lusow house, how long he had left to turn everything around. 

“Twenty minutes maybe. She’s in the garden with Ronnie. Make it right dude. You can’t fuck this up. You’re crazy about each other.”

“I know. I’m going to make it right. I’m going to make everything right.”

He dashed through French doors into the garden. He saw her with Veronica at the edge of the lawn, looking down onto the beach and hurried over. “Evening V. Would you excuse us for a moment? I need to talk to Betty.”

Veronica looked at Betty and only walked away when her friend nodded. “You came back. I’m so glad. I didn’t want you to leave with everything so screwed up,” she said, her eyes red with tears.

He ached with the need to embrace her. “Betts, I have something I have to tell you. It’s a long, totally unfuckingbelievable story. But can I just hold you for a second first? Please?” She sobbed and flung herself into his arms and he held her, her cheek resting against his chest, her body so soft and warm against him. “Christ I love you so much Betts. Always,” he murmured into her hair.

“I’m sorry that I’ve messed us up Jug. I never meant to,” she whispered against his chest.

“Hey, it’s ok. There’s time to make it right but we have to think. Come on, let’s sit on the beach.” He led her down to the shingle and they sat together. “Now, I don’t understand the story that I’m going to tell you but our lives depend on you believing it. You have to listen and you have to try to believe me. OK?”

“I’ll listen, but you’re scaring me Jug. Are you OK?”

He knew that she would think that he was delusional. He was going to have to scare her. There was no other way. He grabbed his phone and showed her a photo that he had taken that afternoon at St Just churchyard. He showed her her own gravestone with what, to her, was today’s date on it as her date of death. She gasped and looked at him aghast. “Jug, why would you…?”

“OK, I know that’s rough. Listen and I’ll tell you what I know.”

He told her about the night he had left her at the party, about his dream, about the next morning, the burned out house. He told her about the next few months, New York, Bay Ridge, Abigail Burble. She was looking at him with increasing concern, struggling to understand. It took a while. By the time he finished his story guests were beginning to leave, car engines revving on the street outside, the sounds of well lubricated farewells in the driveway.

“I know that none of this makes sense Betty. At some point you have to give up trying to make it make sense. That’s what I’ve had to do. I’m three years ahead of you on a timeline, your life ends tonight along with Archie’s and Ronnie’s and Winnie’s. But we can change it. Hotdog was supposed to die here but you gave him to me and he lived. That must mean you can live too but you can’t stay here tonight. You all have to leave or you’ll all die.”

“I wish I could believe you Jug but this can’t be true. You can’t expect me to just throw out everything I know about how the world works. I see that you believe this, but we need to get you some professional help, right now. This is a major delusional break, you might need to be in hospital.”

“Right. Ok. I wouldn’t believe it either.” He yelled “Hotdog, here boy,” and seconds later the huge dog appeared, sixty five pounds of fluff, bounding through the French doors accompanied by yelling and the sound of breaking glassware. She gasped. “What the hell? Where’s Hotdog? Who's this?”

“And there’s this Betts. Look at this.” He handed her the book, her book. She turned the cover and read the dedication, a dedication that she had written that afternoon and emailed only four hours ago when she finally submitted her thesis. He saw her grip on reality tremble and quiver in front of his eyes. 

She seemed to reach a determination as he watched. “We have to get Winnie out of here. How the hell are we going to explain this to Archie and Veronica?”

“I don’t know. As far as the world out there is concerned you guys are dead. Archie had some big hits on the strength of being deceased. So if you get out of here do you just pop back into existence three years later? Not sure how we’ll explain that one. Or maybe you’ll just wake tomorrow and have to live three years to catch up to me. If it’s the last one then maybe it’d be better not to explain it to them. It’s messing us up, do we need them messed up as well? I’ve been wondering if it’s to do with time. Like maybe, somehow, our timelines have got stuck to each other, tangled up like fishing lines. Maybe we’re swapping between them. For a long time I thought you were a ghost but now I think that it’s me. I’m the ghost but I’m haunting you from the future. Christ, I don’t know.”

“Can we prevent the fire? What do you know about where it starts?” Betty was always the practical one, looking to solve the problem in front of her, shoving aside the metaphysical questions that Jug got tied up in.

“I don’t know. The papers suggested maybe it was the stove, something about flue gases in the pipes and an explosion all through the place. I've no idea how to make it safe and there isn’t time.”

“Ok well, let’s lean into it then. Got your lighter?”

Jug was a little disturbed at the efficient and unsentimental way in which Betty laid a fire in one of the bedrooms. She used the pages of her own book alongside the electrical outlet nearest to the curtains and soon had a decent blaze going. She grabbed the baby from her room and headed down the back stairs. Archie was in the hallway, saying goodbye to a few stragglers, and raised an eyebrow when he saw them coming downstairs with his daughter. “Hi Arch. Jug and I were just… uhhh…. talking up in my room and I heard Winnie crying. I thought I’d bring her down to get her settled. That OK?”

“Sure, thanks Betty. You two all ok again now?”

“Never better, thanks pal,” Jug said and patted Archie’s back. They headed out onto the lawn where Veronica joined them, taking her daughter into her own arms, stroking her hair. She glanced up at the house and her mouth fell open. She pointed to the flames licking up the outside of the building from the bedroom. 

Betty yelled “Fire! Archie the house is on fire!” 

Archie began to run upstairs but Jug grabbed his arm. “It’s well alight pal. It isn’t worth the risk. You have to look out for your family. Let’s call the fire department. 999 here right?”

The call was made and Jug took Betty’s arm and pulled her aside. “The timeline is fucked up Betts. Say I’m the ghost here, if this is the night Lusow House burns down, I’m on a beach in Koh Samui right now. It’s the early morning and I’m slowly breaking a girl’s heart. If I’m here, written up in the newspapers as here, then we set up a paradox. Everything in my life conspired to bring me to this place at the right moment to fall in love with you. If we change anything there’s no guarantee that I come here and if I don’t you all die tonight. I think I need to leave, and I think you have to stay. Is that crazy?”

She nodded, looking over at Veronica, cradling her sleeping daughter. “Let’s not take any risks. Come to the day-mark tomorrow, your tomorrow, eight o clock. I’ll wait for you. Ok?” He nodded and took her face in his hands, kissing her and praying to a God he didn’t believe in, that it wouldn’t be the last time.

He watched them from the window of Valerian Cottage. It took almost fifteen minutes before the first fire truck arrived, finding the occupants of the property on the lawn, watching as the house burned. Three more crews arrived throughout the course of the night but the fire spread more quickly that they could tackle it and they simply let it burn out. Eventually the figures on the lawn were taken away in cars, probably to a hotel Jug guessed, longing to go with them, but instead staying and looking at the smoking ruins of Lusow House.

He must have fallen asleep at some point because he opened his eyes to the building site that had greeted him when he arrived in Portscatho. Workmen were beginning their shifts, pulling on overalls and hard hats, starting engines and gathering materials.

He changed and walked up to the tower, Hotdog running ahead. As he watched, the dog bounded up to a figure by the day-mark, looking out to sea, one hand shielding her eyes. He didn’t let himself believe it was her until she knelt down to hug and kiss the dog. Then, as he approached, his heart leaping in his chest, she turned and smiled at him. “You made it Mr Jones. I’ve been waiting for you. Three years. You’d better make that up to me. By the way I hope you like the house I’m building for us down there because I really can’t afford it without you, faculty stipends are terrible.”

He didn’t say anything, simply swept her into his arms and kissed her as she laughed in delight. “Three years? I saw you last night. Let’s go and catch up.”

“Let’s do that down there in your bedroom shall we? I’ve been waiting for you and wanting you for three years until I think I might lose my mind. It was so hard not to come and get you but I knew I mustn’t. I had to let it play out or you wouldn’t be able to save us. I only cheated once.” 

“I saw you. Or maybe I just felt you.”

They smiled at each other, unable to keep their fingers from each other’s faces, the kissing interrupting their progress down the hill, the dog leaping around them in excited circles.

“Hey I went over to see if my grave was there yesterday but it’s gone. There’s an old man buried there now,” she said as they walked.

“Morbid much Cooper?”

“Just curious. Oh by the way Winnie has a little brother. They wanted to call him Forsythe. I told them everything.”

“Oh god, poor little kid.”

“It’s alright, they called him Ernest instead. I said we might want Forsythe for ours.” He stared at her for a moment and then began to kiss her with more intent as they stumbled toward the cottage, finally on the same page.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lusow is Cornish for ash.  
> Valerian is a hedgerow plant in Cornwall. It's a herb which is most commonly used for sleep disorders, especially insomnia.  
> St Just in Roseland churchyard is famous for being gorgeous. If you have to be dead it's not a terrible venue for it.


End file.
